Sixteen student teams participated in this year's BioSignal Challenge. The students had to create an algorithm for sleep apnea detection using advanced signal processing, machine learning or artificial intelligence methods in MATLAB. An expert jury evaluated the individual processes and the three best teams received financial rewards - 15,000, 9,000 and 6,000 crowns.
Head of the Department of Sleep Medicine of the National Institute of Mental Health Associate Professor MUDr. Jitka Bušková, Ph.D., pointed out during the announcement of the results that sleep apnoea is a major health problem that affects every third man and every fifth woman in the Czech Republic. She pointed out that apnoea is among the risk factors for several serious diseases - including hypertension and stroke. It also causes sleep deprivation. "A person who suffers from it is chronically sleep deprived, and does not wake up refreshed in the morning," said Associate Professor Bušková. She pointed out that doctors and physicians need to know the severity of apnoea in each patient, as the treatment procedure is based on this condition. For example, they may be given pressurization therapy, but also surgery.
"The first place went to the team of Vojtěch Brejtr and Matouš Soldát. They decided to solve the problem using a recurrent neural network," said Ing. Filip Šlapal, M.Sc. from the Department of Circuit Theory at FEE CTU. Both members of the winning team are students of the Master's degree programme BIO. The silver medal was awarded to Jiří Šmíd, a student of the Electronics and Communications programme. "Jiří Šmíd extracted signs from the signal and then used a Gaussian mixture model to detect apnoeic segments," noted Ing. Šlapal. The third place went to the team of Lucie Hosová, Anna Svobodová and Tomáš Thoř, students of the BIO programme. "The team extracted various symptoms from the signal and then used a trained SVM classifier to classify the apnoeic segments," added Ing. Šlapal. The awards were presented on behalf of BTL by Ing. Vladyslava Čeledová, Ph.D., for NÚDZ doc. MUDr. Jitka Bušková, Ph.D., for Humusoft Ing. Jan Daněk and Ing. Martina Mudrová, Ph.D. and for the Faculty of Electrical Engineering doc. RNDr. Veronika Sobotíková, CSc.
The presentation of the new BIO logo followed the competition. The author of the logo is Lukáš Najman, a first-year student in this programme. "Thanks to his design and with his help, the new promotional items of the programme also saw the light of day," added Ing. Šlapal. T-shirts, stickers or canvas bags in the new design were immediately available for purchase by visitors to the event. If you missed the Summer Biomedical Day, the complete offer can be viewed on the website. If you are interested in purchasing items, please contact Ing. Šlapal.
After the presentation of the event partners BTL, NÚDZ and Humusoft, who presented to the participants various opportunities for internships and cooperation within the studio, "free entertainment" broke out. It included a concert by the rock band Brain Issues, made up of students from the BIO programme.
You can soak up the atmosphere of the event or commemorate it with photos taken by Gabriela Goffová.
