Marlin Siebert today received the Innovation Award 2020 of the "Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Krankenhaustechnik" (WGKT e.V.), which is endowed with 3,000 €, for his outstanding master’s thesis entitled "Optimization and Robustification of the model predictive control to the ventilation system of an anaesthesia workstation".
In his thesis, which he wrote under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Philipp Rostalski and Georg Männel, M.Sc. Marlin Siebert describes how modern methods of model-based control can improve the safety and reliability of ventilation control.
Not only since the current Covid-19 pandemic, modern intensive care ventilation has played a central role in clinical practice. Nevertheless, the application of for example too high or too low positive airway pressure carries the risk to cause long-term damage to the patient and, with respect to patients who are already severely ill, of further increasing mortality.
In close cooperation between the Institute of Electrical Engineering in Medicine at the University of Lübeck and the company Dräger, Marlin Siebert was able to show that a robust and safe ventilation control can be realized by means of model-predictive control. The chosen approach allows to maintain safety-relevant physiological limits even in the presence of certain disturbances by compensating errors that may arise from modelling the patient lung itself, identifying the parameters of the model or continuously changing the patient's state of health, and thus potentially improves patient safety.
Read the full press release here (in German).
