Tag: medicine

Manual mining of biomedical texts

teaching citizen scientists to precisely identify concepts and concept relationships in biomedical text. This is a task that anyone can learn to do and can perform better than any known computer program. Once these tasks are completed, advanced statistical algorithms take the data provided by the volunteers and use it to provide scientists with new tools for finding the information that they require within the sea of biomedical knowledge.

hopefully this is only a very short term solution as proper machine learning techniques take over. seems useful to bootstrap though.

Ribs

bedside manners

Myoelectric Prosthesis

The state of prosthetic hands remains underreported.

2021-11-05: Bionic hands are now good enough for concert pianists.

Although the gloves are not a definitive fix, they work beautifully for now. “It’s a palliative solution that makes small miracles happen”. They’ve given him a new way of understanding his passion. The ability to play a perfect recital nonstop is long gone, but a different sort of appreciation has emerged in its place. A few minutes of flawless playing is magical enough. “For me, 2 minutes I consider a miracle.” Perhaps the most remarkable part is how much they cost: only $300. After what they did for the maestro, imagine the promise they hold for everyone else? They seem ripe for mass production, but Costa is currently only able to make simplified versions on a case-by-case basis for focal dystonia patients and stroke victims. These have been met with varying degrees of success. Perhaps this is out of defensiveness for his creation, but Costa implies that not everyone has the same stubborn desire to get better as Martins does.

Health insights from Genomics

we will generate more health insights in the next 10 years than we’ve had in the last 100

Prenatal genome analysis

Exploring his son’s genome several months before he was born, Khan found few surprises. He’s just a regular kid. “It’s mostly pretty boring. So that is good”

Brain-immune connection

the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist

Fighting back against antivaxxers

the state has become the first to remove philosophical exemptions from its vaccination law

it’s always cause for celebration when stupidity is retreating. it doesn’t happen nearly often enough. of course they left in religious exemptions, which are just as dumb.

Converting blood to neural cells

Now we can take easy to obtain blood samples, and make the main cell types of neurological systems in a dish that is specialized for each patient. Until now, no one’s had the ability and required technology to actually test different drugs to find something that targets the peripheral nervous system, and not the central nervous system, in a patient-specific manner

Immune system cloaking

Researchers has come up with a way to reduce immune-system rejection of implantable devices used for drug delivery, tissue engineering, or sensing. Previous research found that smooth surfaces, especially spheres, are better — but counterintuitively, larger spheres actually work better at reducing scar tissue. “We realized that regardless of what the composition of the material is, this effect still persists, and that made it a lot more exciting because it’s a lot more generalizable”.

Electrical angiogenesis

The pulses stimulated angiogenesis — the process by which new blood vessels form — increasing blood flow to the damaged area and resulting in wounds healing significantly faster.