As part of the seventh edition of the European Health Hackathon (EHH) 2025, a FIT CTU student and his team secured third place in the InterSystems category. EHH is the largest of its kind in Central Europe. This year, over 60 ethical hackers from the Czech Republic and other European countries participated, seeking innovative solutions to improve healthcare and patient care. The winning teams shared a financial reward of 175,000 CZK. The event took place from March 7 to 9 at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague (IKEM).
The team from FIT CTU and FEL CTU, named Balvan, consisting of Robin Klubarski (FIT), Viktorie Valdmanová (FEL), and Ondřej Baštař (FEL), placed third in the InterSystems category. The problem the team addressed was related to analyzing tumor aggression based on the ratio of proliferating cells. Currently, this issue is mainly handled by the "look and see" method or manual labeling of proliferating cells based on their color. The Balvan team developed an extension for the already-used open-source tool QuPath for the analysis of biological images. The extension uses machine vision to detect these cells and then displays various statistics (cell proliferation intensity, cluster formation, statistics of a given segment). This statistic helps doctors determine the overall aggression of the tumor.
"The hackathon was great, and we were especially happy that we could help doctors and indirectly save lives. At the same time, we had our prototype ready relatively early, so we weren't too stressed, as is often the case," said Robin Klubarski. "What makes us even happier is that we are already collaborating with IKEM to improve our solution and possibly write a scientific paper. That gives us a much better feeling than a higher cash prize for placing higher," he adds.
"During this year's EHH, teams presented many smart and also bold solutions that we are very eager to further develop at IKEM. Therefore, we will continue to reach out to not only the winners but also other teams to continue our collaboration," said Ivan Veselý, head of the IKEM IT Department.
