Tag: medicine

Ectogenesis

I’m making the matrix reference so you don’t have to.

Fetal lambs lived for weeks in a fluid-filled bag. Tests to help premature babies could begin in 3 years. The device, eyed as an improvement over incubators, kept fetal animals alive using a sterile, temperature-controlled plastic bag filled with amniotic fluid.

2022-06-02: Given that most countries are now below replacement fertility rates, we should be strongly in favor of Ectogenesis, on top of many other good reasons.

The Blood of the Crab

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel—and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500K every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved? He’d like to eventually take some of his discoveries to the medical labs with the hope that they can improve their bleeding practices. If we know the bleeding process reduces the crab’s hemocyanin, which compromises their immune system, feeding them a diet of copper before they are returned to the water might help bring their hemocyanin levels back up. He’d like to sell the idea to the bleeding labs. But to date, his attempts to reach them, —even to simply confirm that their bleeding simulations are accurate —have gone unanswered.

Medical Tourism SEZ

The Chinese government have set up a special economic zone for medical tourism. Hainan Boao Lecheng international medical tourism pilot zone, the first of its kind in the country, was approved by the State Council in 2013. It enjoys 9 preferential policies, including special permission for medical talent, technology, devices and drugs, and an allowance for entrance of foreign capital and international communications. The pilot zone also has permission to carry out leading-edge medical technology research, such as stem cell clinical research.

Automated diagnosis

“I think that if you work as a radiologist you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon. You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.” Deep-learning systems for breast and heart imaging have already been developed commercially. “It’s just completely obvious that in 5 years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. It might be 10 years. I said this at a hospital. It did not go down too well.”

2022-10-05: The deep learning dividend for medicine

Today’s report on AI of retinal vessel images to help predict the risk of heart attack and stroke, from 65k UK Biobank participants, reinforces a growing body of evidence that deep neural networks can be trained to “interpret” medical images far beyond what was anticipated. Add that finding to last week’s multinational study of deep learning of retinal photos to detect Alzheimer’s disease with good accuracy. AI models have been shown to be quite useful for detecting eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy. But this is about the indirects, the not so obvious. That work has now extended to detection of kidney disease, control of blood glucose and blood pressure, hepatobiliary disease, a previous study on predicting heart attack, close correlation of the retinal vessels with the heart (coronary) artery calcium score


2023-07-31: Misdiagnosis is one of the biggest causes of death, yet doctors think they’re better than AI

~800k Americans are permanently disabled or die each year from diagnostic medical errors. “Our results demonstrate that, unless the documented mistakes can be corrected, the optimal solution involves assigning cases either to humans or to AI, but rarely to a human assisted by AI.”

The Pizza Funeral

On March 5, 1973, 30 people headed out to a farm in Ossineke, Michigan, to witness an unusual event: the burial of an estimated 30K frozen, family-size mushroom pizzas. The mood was somber, and a little cheesy. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief homily “on courage in the face of tragedy,” before bulldozers began shoving pizzas into an 6m hole.

Screening for Stroke

There has been no cost-effective way to screen for strokes, which cost the US government 10s of billions of $ a year. That could be about to change, thanks to a breakthrough technology from CVR Medical. What 3D seismic imagery did for super quick discoveries in the oil and gas industry, CVR’s sensory system could do for the medical industry.

NYC ATM microbes

Microorganisms associated with mollusks and bony fish predominated in Asian neighborhoods in Flushing and Manhattan’s Chinatown. Traces of microbes linked with chicken appeared more in a largely black community in Harlem. And ATMs in predominantly white neighborhoods were festooned with Xeromyces bisporus, a mold associated with the “spoilage of high-sugar foods such as cakes and confectionaries