NURTURE project coordinator at Debre Markos University, Dr. Askalemariam Adamu Dessie, reports that DMU, in collaboration with NURTURE, has conducted a 6-day training session for all Health Informatics staff and 2nd year MSc students of Health Data Science on “Data Analysis Using Machine Learning (Python)” from 24th to 29th October 2024 at DMU. The session’s lecturer Ph.D. Fentahun from Addis Ababa University has led the sessions.
Dr. Askalemariam elaborates that Machine Learning (ML) is a critical component of modern Health Informatics and Health Data Science enabling better decision-making. Accordingly, to enhance the capacity in the domain, DMU has made this training mandatory for all the abovementioned groups of staff and students with a focus on practical applications of ML in healthcare.
This comprehensive training was conducted for 35 participants of which 17 were Health Informatics staff and 18 were MSc Health Data Science students. The training was aimed at bridging the theoretical knowledge and practical application preparing participants to address real-world related challenges.
The objectives of the training were to equip the participants with fundamental and practical ML skills, enable them to design and implement ML models for healthcare applications, enhance their understanding of ethical and interpretive aspects of ML in healthcare, and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing between them while introducing key ML tools and libraries used in Health Informatics research.
Day 1 of training revolved around the fundamentals of ML accompanied by hands-on activities. Day 2 revolved around data processing and feature engineering accompanied by hands-on activities. Day 3 revolved around building ML models accompanied by hands-on projects. Day 4 revolved around advanced ML techniques. Day 5 revolved around hands-on projects. Day 6 revolved around project-based learning.
As the outcomes of the training session, participants gained technical and domain-specific skills and got engaged in extensive hands-on activities and projects relevant to the case studies of healthcare where complex concepts were explained clearly and simply to them. In addition, participants showed great interest and motivation for follow-up workshops with a focus on Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing. Dr. Askalemariam reports that in the future it is important to provide ongoing support through mentorship programs and collaboration projects while at the same time aiming to expand the training to include participants from other healthcare-related sectors. However, challenges such as varying levels of initial technical skill among participants and limited availability of high-quality domain-specific datasets for training were a bit challenging, as Dr. Askalemariam reports.
Below you can find some photos from the 6-day training session:
