AI to Help Ukraine Medics Triage Life-threatening Shrapnel Wounds

Ukraine is partnering with the U.K. to harness the power of AI to help its medics more quickly identify life-threatening shrapnel wounds among the injured and prioritize their treatment.

Researchers from the Karkiv National University of Radio Electronics (NURE) in Ukraine and the University of Warwick in England are developing AI models that are better at spotting life-threatening injuries than the naked eye.

It works by taking CT scan data and feeding it into an AI platform to make the assessment.

“A huge problem for medics dealing with many severely injured people at the same time is the rapid identification of life-threatening injuries so they can prioritize who needs emergency surgery soonest,” said professor Mark Williams from the University of Warwick.

“As well as being useful in other emergency situations such as earthquakes, the research is also applicable to doctors in trauma wards ... who need to triage patients quickly,” he added.

The British scientists are using their expertise in additive manufacturing and material composition to identify shrapnel material in human bodies. They are developing phantom models with 3D replicas of shrapnel wounds and human anatomy. These will represent ‘test objects,’ which can be used in computer modeling to train the AI program and calibrate the technology.

The project is part of the Twinning Initiative, a collaboration among universities around the world to help their Ukrainian counterparts in concrete ways. It is funded by a £5 million ($6.2 million) grant from Research England, through Universities U.K. International.