In June, 13 students from Marquette competed as three teams in the 2024 Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) Hackathon in National Harbor, Maryland, gaining first-hand experience working with real clinicians to identify and address a health care problem.
The SIIM Hackathon is an annual challenge for professional and student teams focused on creating innovative software applications that leverage medical imaging data to improve clinical success and patient care. Judging criteria for the 2024 Hackathon included innovation and originality, practicality and usefulness, and use of web-based medical APIs.
Over three days, Marquette’s teams interacted with clinical and technical experts to identify a real-world problem and deliver an informatics solution.
Marquette earned first place for the project, “Monitoring Adverse-Drug Side Effects in Medical Imaging while Informing the FDA with FHIR,” fourth place for the project, “Leveraging LLM’s and Retrieval Augmented Generation Vectors to Streamline Research of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Resources for Clinicians” and sixth place for the project, “Immunotherapy Viability Test for Lung Cancer through AI Analysis of Liquid Biopsy.”
In addition to hands-on technical experience, the open-ended hackathon format offered Marquette students an extensive opportunity to engage directly with clinicians to better understand a problem statement they wanted to address.
“You could tell these kids were hungry. Walking through the hotel and conference facility during all hours of the day, I kept bumping into them together, brainstorming how to solve real-world, right-now, gotta-fix-them patient care problems.”
Dr. Christopher J. Roth, associate chief medical officer for Duke Health Imaging Services and vice chair for Duke Radiology Informatics
One such clinician was Dr. Christopher J. Roth, associate chief medical officer for Duke Health Imaging Services and vice chair for Duke Radiology Informatics. Roth was impressed by the drive that Marquette’s teams brought to the competition.
“You could tell these kids were hungry. Walking through the hotel and conference facility during all hours of the day, I kept bumping into them together, brainstorming how to solve real-world, right-now, gotta-fix-them patient care problems,” Roth says. “The questions they asked were insightful and they were a delight to teach.”
To empower teams to create truly valuable solutions, SIIM provided HL7 FHIR server and API access, 10 patient personas to consider, life-like mock medical data and images, and several mentors to guide the experience. The challenge’s realism was a thrill for the Marquette teams.
“We worked on projects that could have a meaningful impact on medical imaging immediately. We discussed the possibility of continuing them as senior design projects at Marquette,” says Nabil Othman, an undergraduate biocomputer engineering student who was a part of Marquette’s winning team. “Exposure to this field has opened up potential career paths and has encouraged me to continue exploring different fields of study at Marquette.”
Marquette’s student teams selected various project roles, including agile sprint managers, presentation managers, GitHub managers, and clinical story developers. All the students were also software developers.
True to Marquette, the team had plenty of support from dedicated alumni mentors who were eager to see the students learn and succeed.
All three teams were mentored by Teri Sippel Schmidt, Eng ‘87, Grad ’90, a SIIM Fellow and imaging informatics industry leader who was also awarded SIIM’s Gold Medal of the Society Award this year. Additionally, Alex Barrington, Eng ’18, Grad ’19, and Thomas OSullivan, Eng ’20, served as technical liaisons at SIIM and guided Marquette’s student teams throughout the event. Barrington is currently an application developer for the American College of Radiology, and OSullivan is a bioinformatics backend engineer for the Radiological Society of North America. Both Barrington and OSullivan previously participated in the Hackathon as undergraduate students, and have recently earned SIIM’s Early Career Achievement Award.
For Paige Harrill, an undergraduate biocomputer engineering student attending SIIM for the second year in a row, these relationships were equally meaningful to the technical learning.
“It was amazing to see people who graduated with my degree and how they’re all doing such different, cool things that they’re passionate about,” Harrill says. “Marquette alumni are always so excited to help current Marquette students, and I love the instant sense of community.”
This year’s results build on Marquette’s success over the last eight years participating in the SIIM Hackathon, including a first place and fifth place finish in 2023.
About the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine
The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) is the leading healthcare professional organization for those interested in the current and future use of informatics in medical imaging. The Society’s mission is to advance medical imaging informatics across the Enterprise through education, research, and innovation in a multi-disciplinary community.
