Point-of-care technologies

• Overview
• Research facilities
• Our people
• Publications

Overview

Associate Professor Shieak Tzeng.

We are dedicated to improving patient outcomes through innovation at the point of care. Optimised monitoring and objective, informed decision-making can revolutionise patient care and save lives.

Using our translational expertise, we marry medical engineering and statistical modelling with the aim of empowering clinicians to make better informed decisions at the bedside.

Our extensive team includes clinicians, neonatologists, physicists, neuroscientists, data scientists, and animal technicians.

Contact

Associate Professor Shieak Tzeng
Tel +64 4 918 5229
Email shieak.tzeng@otago.ac.nz

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Research

Decision-making software

The Precision Health in Surgical and Intensive Care (PHySIC) group, is combining active clinical research, novel clinical databases, and machine learning, to determine patient status and needs in critical care.

PHySIC is an open source, anonymous archive database holding continuous wave-form data alongside the usual clinical information sourced from ICU’s and intraoperative spaces across New Zealand’s District Health Boards.

Through relationships with Wellington Regional Hospital, Capital Coast DHB, and clinical collaborators, our team are actively working towards the creation of a novel, New Zealand-specific medical database based on MIT’s MIMIC (Multi-parameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care).

Data scientists and machine learning experts at the University of Otago, Wellington, and Victoria University Wellington are using the PHySIC database to create predictive models for the likes of sepsis and cardiac surgery risk, the potential for innovating treatment with predictive models extends to every corner of New Zealand critical care.

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Medical engineering

Translational and clinical researchers at the University of Otago Wellington campus have partnered with physicists and engineers at Victoria University Wellington with the aim to innovate bedside brain-health detection.

Through this collaboration, they hope to validate brain diagnoses and monitoring in an accessible paradigm. Making these capabilities more available will empower more clinicians in their decision making and lead to better care of critical neurological disorders.

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Research facilities

The Centre for Translational Physiology at the University of Otago can offer unique research facilities such as:

• GENESIS environmental chamber able to simulate a variety of extreme environmental conditions by altering temperature, humidity and altitude.
• Whole body room calorimeter
• DXA scanner
• Ultrasound (transcranial, vascular, cardiac)
• Near-infrared spectroscopy
• Cardiopulmonary bypass
• Wireless physiological monitoring

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Our people

The team, led from University of Otago Wellington campus, includes physiologists, surgeons, neonatologists, and engineers.

Point-of-care research leader

Associate Professor Shieak Tzeng, systems physiology and biomedical signal processing

Investigators

• Mr Waqar Aziz, PhD student, PHySIC
• Dr Max Berry, PHySIC
• Dr Maria Saito-Benz, PhD student, PHySIC
• Associate Professor Paul Teal, PHySIC

External collaborators

• Dr Sergei Obruchkov, Victoria University of Wellington
• Mr Dion Thomas, PhD student, Victoria University of Wellington

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Publications