18-04-2025
Medical student's AI-powered app aims to simplify complex medical test results
Artificial Intelligence is now helping to interpret complicated medical test results. The simple effects earned a local medical student a place in history.
Tyler Smith is a Northwestern Student and an AI Fellow at Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute who grew up in Vernon Hills. He is now a finalist for a National Innovators Award by the American Medical Student Association.
There is a big cash prize to bring his dream to life, a first of its kind app to help people improve heart health.
'We believe that this can help them down the road, mitigate their cardiovascular risk and lead healthier happier lives,' he said.
It was a bright idea led to many long dark nights in front of his computer.
'We've been developing this application for the last year. You know it started as a simple idea back in April 2024 of 'How can we make patient test explainable to patients?'' he said. 'And through a year of blood, sweat and tears and many late nights we have this mentally viable product.'
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Smith, is also an AI expert and he put his two loves together with one lofty goal: beating heart disease.
'It is the number one killer. It is the number one most expensive and it's on the rise as well,' he said. 'So this is a really important aspect of health to be tackling.'
Through complicated algorithms, Smith hopes to change the statistics regarding test results.
'What we're doing is taking your personalized lipid results and making them explainable to patients,' he said.
As part of an annual physical, or when doctors suspect looming heart troubles, they order a lipid panel.
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'Patients get just a big sheet of many terms that are medical jargon triglycerides HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, what's the good one? What's the bad one? And not only are the terms confusing but there's all of these ranges,' Smith said.
Enter Lipid Llama.
'I did the science, I did the design,' Smith said.
A human designer collaborating with artificial intelligence. The result? Answers immediately.
Recent results are for a 55-year-old test patient had Llama raising the red flag.
The results said the patient's triglyceride level was considered high.
'Triglycerides are a type of fat found in your blood and high levels can increase your risk of heart disease,' the results said.
The results used simple langue and that was the goal, according to Smith.
'We really curated this to be succinct, accurate and understandable,' he said. 'I collected large amount of patient education, documents about heart, health healthy lifestyle, high cholesterol, blood test … anything imaginable that a patient might ask about their heart or their blood test is probably in that database.'
In addition to model patients, Smith tested it on some very important people.
'I've had my mother and my grandparents run through it,' he said. 'My mom loved it. My grandma loved it.'
Not available to the public yet, now the scientists are set to judge for a prize worth $125,000.
'We have been able to reach the finals and so we will be pitching there on Friday,' Smith said. '(I am) very nervous, but also very confident.'
And he's confident if he gets the prize, he can have the app tested and up and running by next year.
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