Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC) Announces Winners of its $55,000 Kaggle Challenge

HOLLAND, Mich., Dec. 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC) announced today the winners of its $55,000 OSIC Pulmonary Fibrosis Progression Challenge, the first-ever computational challenge for interstitial lung diseases (ILDs). The AI-focused competition was administered by Kaggle, the world's largest data science community platform, and asked participants to use machine learning to predict lung function decline in people living with pulmonary fibrosis.

The top three Kaggle investigators to devise the highest performing algorithm were first place winner Artyom Kulakov (Russia), second place winner Yusuke Ikemoto (Japan), and third place winner Khang Pham (Japan). The winners were selected from nearly 40,000 entries submitted by more than 2,500 global competitors.

"Our goal from the beginning has been to bring together experts from orthogonally-related verticals to see if we could approach this disease from a different angle. We saw three innovative approaches from these winners, and we know we can build on this to make meaningful progress in the fight against IPF and other interstitial lung diseases," said Elizabeth Estes, OSIC's executive director. "We are happy to announce that we will be hosting a second challenge in 2021 to help us continue this important work on behalf of patients around the world."

Kaggle is a global online competition platform made up of data scientists and machine learning practitioners designed to allow users to publish data and create data science challenges. With well over 5,000,000 registered users from 250 different countries, Kaggle competitions have resulted in many successful programs including advancing medical research in HIV and cancer, as well as creating forecasting models for traffic and driving advances in neural networks.

OSIC – a global, not-for-profit collaborative effort between academia, industry and philanthropy – was created to enable rapid advances in the fight against ILDs such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and other respiratory conditions, including emphysema. Its mission is to bring together radiologists, clinicians and computational scientists from around the world to improve imaging-based approaches to diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. IPF has no known cause and no known cure, and is characterized by scarring of the lungs leading to an irreversible decline in pulmonary function. People living with IPF have an average life expectancy of three to five years after diagnosis.

The OSIC Pulmonary Fibrosis Progression Challenge was led by Dr. David Barber, University College London & OSIC's lead computational scientist; Dr. Simon Walsh, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London & OSIC's lead radiologist; and Dr. Kevin Brown, National Jewish Health & OSIC's lead pulmonologist.

OSIC is supported by an impressive list of global institutions working together in pre-competitive areas for mutual benefit and, most importantly, the benefit of patients. Members include Boehringer Ingelheim, Siemens Healthineers, CSL Behring, FLUIDDA, Galapagos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Université de Lyon, Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli, National Jewish Health, Brainomix, Pavilhão Pereira Filho – Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre, Universita di Genova, VIDA, and National Hospital Organization Kinki-Chuo Chest Medical Center.

To stay up-to-date on OSIC's latest news, visit www.OSICILD.org or follow the organization on Twitter at @OSICild.

SOURCE Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC)

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