Sölvi Rögnvaldsson, BS student in Applied Mathematics at the University of Iceland's Faculty of Physical Sciences, received the President's Student Innovation Award earlier this week. Sölvi got the award for his project "Risk calculator for treating patients with myeloma". The project was funded by the Student Innovation Fund last summer.
The President of Iceland, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, presented the award at a special ceremony at Bessastaðir (the presidential residence). Four other projects were nominated.
Sölvi's project focuses on the development of a risk calculator in the treatment of patients. This is a statistical model the helps doctors decide on a treatment for patients with myeloma, a serious bone marrow cancer. "The model uses data on factors like age, gender and underlying diseases to calculate the patient's prognosis and is a better predictor that the risk calculator currently used. A vast collection of data, unique worldwide, was used in developing the calculator. The data contains information on diagnoses and survival of over 13.000 Swedish myeloma patients between 1985-2013," as stated on The Icelandic Centre for Research's website.
Sölvi worked on the project in close collaboration with Ingigerður Sólveig Sverrisdóttir, MD, PhD students at the Faculty of Medicine, and Master's students in applied statistics at the Faculty of Physical Sciences. An article on this project will appear in the next issue of the UI Magazine in March. To make the risk calculator accessible to specialists in haematology they designed a website and an iPhone app. The goal is to adopt it worldwide. The methodology developed in the project could also be used to create other risk calculators for other diseases as pointed out on the Icelandic Centre for Research's website.
Sölvi's supervisors in this project were Sigrún Helga Lund, Associate Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Iceland, and Sigurður Yngvi Kristinsson, Professor in Internal Medicine at the UI's Faculty of Medicine.
The President's Student Innovation Award
The award is presented to outstanding performance of university students that are grantees of the Student Innovation Fund. The award is presented by the President of Iceland. The Award was first presented in 1996, making this the twenty-first time.