ISTHMUS: Secure, Scalable, Real-time and Robust Machine Learning Platform for Healthcare
It solves the problem of scaling ML in healthcare for developers and organizations, but it is incremental as it adapts existing platform concepts to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of deploying machine learning models in healthcare by introducing Isthmus, a cloud-based platform that addresses data quality, clinical relevance, and regulatory compliance issues, resulting in reduced time to market for operationalizing ML/AI in healthcare, as demonstrated through case studies including trauma survivability prediction and real-time IoT data integration.
In recent times, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) based systems have evolved and scaled across different industries such as finance, retail, insurance, energy utilities, etc. Among other things, they have been used to predict patterns of customer behavior, to generate pricing models, and to predict the return on investments. But the successes in deploying machine learning models at scale in those industries have not translated into the healthcare setting. There are multiple reasons why integrating ML models into healthcare has not been widely successful, but from a technical perspective, general-purpose commercial machine learning platforms are not a good fit for healthcare due to complexities in handling data quality issues, mandates to demonstrate clinical relevance, and a lack of ability to monitor performance in a highly regulated environment with stringent security and privacy needs. In this paper, we describe Isthmus, a turnkey, cloud-based platform which addresses the challenges above and reduces time to market for operationalizing ML/AI in healthcare. Towards the end, we describe three case studies which shed light on Isthmus capabilities. These include (1) supporting an end-to-end lifecycle of a model which predicts trauma survivability at hospital trauma centers, (2) bringing in and harmonizing data from disparate sources to create a community data platform for inferring population as well as patient level insights for Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), and (3) ingesting live-streaming data from various IoT sensors to build models, which can leverage real-time and longitudinal information to make advanced time-sensitive predictions.