Weil Institute member lands major Innovation Challenge victory
Dr. Daniel Ehrmann credits Weil Institute Grand Challenge for helping to fuel his project’s success.
Contact:
Katelyn Murphy,
Marketing Communications Specialist, Weil Institute
mukately@med.umich.edu
ANN ARBOR, MI – On June 1, the Frankel Cardiovascular Center at Michigan Medicine announced the winners of its 2023 Innovation Challenge. Topping the list as one of the two grand prize awardees was Dr. Daniel Ehrmann, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and a member of the U-M Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation, who presented his team’s novel closed loop control system for optimizing fluid management in patients recovering from congenital heart surgery.
Fluid overload is a common complication following heart surgery. To help patients maintain a safe balance in their bodies, care teams will administer diuretics—medications that increase urine production; however, the initiation and titration (the amount given and timing) of these medications are often based on clinical intuition and can vary, potentially leading to over- or under-administration. Ehrmann and his team’s closed loop control system will not only optimize this process but also automate it by learning and following a set of titration rules driven by “fuzzy logic”.
“Traditional logic is very black/white, whereas fuzzy logic adds a gray area that dovetails nicely with how clinicians tend to think about data,” said Ehrmann. “For example, if you were to ask a clinician about a value for a patient’s urine output, they would look at that data and likely say that the output is ‘a little bit high’ or ‘a little bit low’ as opposed to just ‘low’ or ‘high’. Fuzzy logic allows us to translate this tendency computationally into a model.”
Ehrmann previously showcased his team’s model as a competitor in the Weil Institute’s Kahn Pediatric Critical Care Grand Challenge, and he attributes his recent success at Frankel to the knowledge and experience he gained throughout this process.
The Weil Institute’s Grand Challenges are unique funding mechanisms that support milestone-driven, early-stage research and innovations addressing gaps in the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of critical illnesses and injuries. While the funding is a major draw for teams, the support that Weil Grand Challenges provide isn’t just monetary: the months-long events are comprised of educational sessions, networking sessions and presentations, as well as multiple rounds of proposal reviews from experts in both clinical and non-clinical realms including data science, engineering and commercialization. This feedback proved invaluable to Ehrmann and his team as they refined their model.
“It was incredibly helpful to get feedback from experienced, multidisciplinary leaders in this domain about how we can take our project and improve it,” said Ehrmann. “From the two-page proposal we submitted as our initial Grand Challenge entry, to the final ten-pager we prepared for the Wolverine Den pitch day, my team received a lot of great, tangible feedback that really forced us to wrestle with questions that needed to be answered in order to do this type of work.”
After the Kahn Grand Challenge, the Weil Institute also connected Dr. Ehrmann with additional funding opportunities including the Frankel Innovation Challenge.
Dr. Ehrmann is one of multiple investigators that have gone on to additional successes following their Grand Challenge experience. Last year, three projects that got their start through the Massey Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Grand Challenge received over $4 million total in follow-on funding through the Department of Defense (DoD). Together, the Kahn and Massey Grand Challenges have provided over $50 million in research funding since 2014.
The Weil Institute continues to lay the groundwork for additional Grand Challenges beyond traumatic brain injury to bolster innovation in areas such as sepsis and combat casualty care. As for Dr. Ehrmann and his team, their next steps will involve working with Weil’s Data Science core to pull the data they need from the electronic health record (EHR) to support their ongoing research. With the Innovation Challenge funding, they will also engage clinicians across Michigan Medicine to learn what their rules and heuristics are for fluid management, which they will then incorporate into the model to further improve its performance.
“The Weil Institute was one of the reasons why I decided to come here [to U-M],” said Ehrmann. “I view them as my academic family. It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of this group.”
Project Team
Daniel Ehrmann, M.D., M.S (Weil Institute, Pediatrics, Cardiology); Kayvan Najarian, Ph.D. (Weil Institute, Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics); John Charpie MD, Ph.D. (Pediatrics, Cardiology); Gabe Owens, M.D. (Pediatrics, Cardiology); Ranjit Aiyagari, M.D. (Pediatrics, Cardiology); Alvaro Rojas-Peña, M.D. (Weil Institute, Transplant Surgery); Rebecca Lombel, M.D. (Pediatrics, Nephrology); Sara Pasquali, M.D., MHS (Pediatrics, Cardiology); Jessica Golbus, M.D., M.S. (Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Medicine); Keith Aronson, M.D., M.S. (Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Medicine); Emily Wittrup, M.S. (Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics); Andrea Les, Ph.D. (Congenital Heart Outcomes Research and Discovery Program) all of Michigan Medicine
Mjaye Mazwi, M.D. (Pediatrics, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, SickKids Hospital, Canada); Danny Eytan, M.D., Ph.D. (Pediatrics, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Rambam Medical Center, Israel)
About the Weil Institute, formerly MCIRCC
The team at the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation (formerly the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care) is dedicated to pushing the leading edge of research to develop new technologies and novel therapies for the most critically ill and injured patients. Through a unique formula of innovation, integration and entrepreneurship that was first imagined by Weil, their multi-disciplinary teams of health providers, basic scientists, engineers, data scientists, commercialization coaches, donors and industry partners are taking a boundless approach to re-imagining every aspect of critical care medicine. For more information, visit weilinstitute.med.umich.edu.