Artemis, the new world’s neonatal protector

Historically, Artemis is known as the revered ancient Greek goddess of many, including protecting child-bearing women and young children.

Today, Artemis is a ground-breaking digital neonatal protector of premature children.

The Western Australian Deputy Premier; Minister for Health; Mental Health; Hon. Roger Cook MLA and Dr. Carolyn McGregor of the University of Ontario met to identify the opportunity to implement the Artemis Platform at the King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women in Perth.

“This is about putting patients first. We are incredibly excited about this cutting-edge project being done in the public health system, through the NICU at King Edward Memorial Hospital”, Minister Cook said.

Developed by Dr. McGregor and the team at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology; the Artemis Platform supports the acquisition and storage of patients’ physiological data streams and clinical information for real-time analytics, retrospective analysis and data mining.

Traditionally, heart rates, blood oxygen levels and respiratory rates of premature and ill children are recorded hourly on paper. This is a fraction of potential data that could be collected – data that can contain vital information on a baby’s health and wellbeing; including the prevention of fatal infections that occur with one-in-five low birth-weight babies.

Patients monitor in neonatal intensive care unitPatients monitor in neonatal intensive care unit
Patients monitor in neonatal intensive care unit

With its flagship at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, the Artemis platform works by connecting to bedside monitors, allowing a live stream and analysis of approximately 1200 data points per second, per patient (equivalent to roughly 600 MB per day of data per patient).

This live collection of data has already reduced false-positive frequencies in collection, has diagnosed different types of neonatal apnoea with 98% accuracy and can prevent babies from receiving too much oxygen – reducing the risk of permanent eye damage.

Dr. James Padbury, Dr. McGregor’s co-author on the Next Generation Neonatal Health Informatics with Artemis, said “the data are extraordinary, it really allows us to add to the kinds of neurological assessments that we’re making with our hands and our eyes, it allows us to make a more comprehensive assessment of the child.”

Nimbus, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre’s Cloud service will be used by the project to stream critical patient data in real-time to healthcare works for real-time analysis. In its creation, Nimbus was specifically designed to facilitate large data workflows, computational tasks and data analytics; which are all critical for the Artemis Platform.

“As a patient’s condition changes, initially it can be very subtle,” said Dr McGregor. “I realised that they didn’t have a platform that could take in all of this data and help them to watch, and that we could learn from all of that data – things that we haven’t learned before. The unique nature of the computing facilities at Pawsey are very important for my work. Bringing this work to the broader community for the betterment of society is very exciting for me.”

Further from Western Australia, the team have future plans for deployment in another Canadian hospital and two hospitals in China.

More information on the Artemis Project is available on the University of Ontario Institute of Technology website.