Double Masking has Limited Benefits, Says Supercomputer Model

Am not in a place to evaluate this analysis, or seen a validation, but surprised we have not seen similar analytics regarding transmission of CoronaVirus.  

Double-Masking Benefits Are Limited, Japan Supercomputer Finds  By Bloomberg, March 12, 2021

Double-masking, as recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yields limited benefits in preventing the spread of droplets that could transmit Covid-19 compared to a single well-fitted disposable mask, according to an analysis conducted with a Japanese supercomputer.

Researchers at Japan's Riken research institute and Kobe University used Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer, to model droplet dispersal.

The simulation demonstrated that wearing just one tightly-fitted disposable mask prevented the spread of 85% of virus-bearing particles, while wearing two masks prevented only 89%.

One well-fitted mask captured 81% of the droplets, compared to 69% by one loosely-fitted mask.

The researchers observed that a tight fit and avoiding gaps in the mask were essential to blocking droplet spread.

From Bloomberg

AI Startups in Healthcare

A look at AI type startups in the health and diagnostic and imaging areas.  Very active.

8 AI Diagnostics and Imaging Startups for Digital Health in NAnalyze

Investing in emerging technologies can be extremely risky. It can also be extremely rewarding – and not just for your bank account. Technologies like artificial intelligence have the potential to change the world in many different ways. One of the industries where AI is already making real advances is healthcare, such as the ability to design and validate drug candidates to treat disease in less than two months. That has attracted the attention of plenty of deep-pocketed investors into AI healthcare startups, which have made more deals than any other AI industry since 2014, according to research firm CB Insights, with more than 80 AI diagnostics and medical imaging companies leading the way across 150 deals and counting.  ...  "

Democratizing AI in Health Care

Perhaps surprising because of the particularly technical aspect of healthcare data.   Interpretation of results are also most important.

Democratizing artificial intelligence in health care  in MIT News

Leo Celi, a researcher at MIT and a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, leads a global series of health care hackathons, or datathons, to bring doctors and data scientists together and encourage hospitals to make use of their electronic medical records.

Hackathons promote doctor-data scientist collaboration and expanded access to electronic medical-records to improve patient care.

By Kim Martineau | MIT Quest for Intelligence 

An artificial intelligence program that’s better than human doctors at recommending treatment for sepsis may soon enter clinical trials in London. The machine learning model is part of a new way of practicing medicine that mines electronic medical-record data for more effective ways of diagnosing and treating difficult medical problems, including sepsis, a blood infection that kills an estimated 6 million people worldwide each year. 

The discovery of a promising treatment strategy for sepsis didn’t come about the regular way, through lengthy, carefully-controlled experiments. Instead, it emerged during a free-wheeling hackathon in London in 2015. ... " 

Report on Watson Health

Did IBM overhype Watson Health's AI promise?
IBM's Watson Health division has been under fire for not delivering on its promise to use AI to enable smarter, more personalized medicine. But IBM officials maintain that hospitals are seeing benefits.  ... "
             By Lucas Mearian  in ComputerWorld

New Apple Watch can do an ECG in 30 Seconds

Watched the detailed Apple presentation of this yesterday.  Amazing the whole thing can now be put into  a Watch and they claim the (one lead) ECG can be requested and be received in thirty seconds.    An AI analysis is said to do the analysis.  Can be recorded and sent to you doctor on a PDF file.    Some elements of 'diagnosis' are involved.   The watch is expense at $400 plus. See in Wired 'Apple Watch Could do more Harm than Good'   https://www.wired.com/story/ecg-apple-watch/     Some physicians at the presentation had similar objections.    ... 

Precision Medicine Insight

Been a member of this Linkedin group for some time.   This announces that my blog will start to cover items in this space more often.    With particular emphasis on efficient therapeutic delivery aspects, and adding machine learning capabilities.  Comments welcome.   Other groups recommended?

Precision Medicine Insight   https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5180384

About this Group: 

Precision Medicine is an approach to discover and develop medicines, vaccines or routes of intervention (behavior, nutrition, etc.) that enable disease prevention and deliver superior therapeutic outcomes for patients, by integrating clinical, molecular (multi-omics including epigenetics), environmental and behavioral (Big Data) information to understand the biological basis of disease. 
This effort leads to better selection of disease targets and identification of patient populations that demonstrate improved clinical outcomes to novel preventive and therapeutic approaches.

In order to achieve this goal novel standards to harvest raw data (SOPs), processes, as well as architectures/analytics including new artificial intelligence, IoT and ICT technologies are instrumental to enable implementation and delivery of Precision Medicine 24/7 anywhere anytime in the world. 

Data in general will become the crude oil and currency of the future, while safety, security, ownership, privacy and so on constitute ethical challenges that need to be discussed alongside technical solutions to foster novel business and improve health care  ... " 

(Update) Data Science and Machine Learning for Healthcare

Cognitive Systems Institute Talk  

24 May 2018: 10:30 AM, ET   (Access Instructions below)

Talk by: Farah Shamout, Oxford University

Title: “Data Science and Machine Learning for Healthcare”   

Abstract:     This talk will highlight the opportunities of AI in healthcare and how current advancements in the field are improving patient outcomes. By focusing on the use of electronic health records (EHRs), I will provide practical data preparation tips and summarize important considerations to keep in mind when using EHRs. Next, I will compare machine learning methods to Early Warning Scores, or the traditional predictors of acutely ill patients that are currently being used in hospitals. Finally, the talk will conclude with the limitations of translating research into clinical settings. 

Bio: Farah Shamout is a PhD student in Engineering Science in the Computational Health Informatics Laboratory at the University of Oxford. Shamout gained her BSc in Computer Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi, before coming to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 2016. Her DPhil focuses on machine learning systems developed using the HAVEN project, and aims to produce a hospital-wide alerting system to assess patients continuously based on machine learning methods and large-scale data acquisition from the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Portsmouth NHS Foundation Trust. Her research touches on both Bayesian nonparametrics and deep learning methods. 
   
Slides and Recording will be placed here.
-------------------

Join the meetings by pointing your web browser to:  https://zoom.us/j/7371462221 ; Callin: (415) 762-9988 or (646) 568-7788 Meeting id 7371462221 ; International Numbers: https://zoom.us/zoomconference.

Slides and Recording will be placed here: http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/

 Join the CSIG LinkedIn Group to get reminders about talks and discuss them. Use twitter: #CSIGNews & #OpenTechAI

Replays before Dec 2015:  Dial 877.471.6587 or 402.970.2667 and enter the call’s Replay ID when prompted for a program ID number.   The Replay ID is listed in the Recording column of each date.

Virtual Doctor Comes via 5G

An interesting preview.  Will 5G be fast enough everywhere to provide services like imaging?  I note also the term IOMT Internet of Medical Things.

Previewing 5G’s effect on the health care industry  via Qualcomm
Your (virtual) doctor will see you now

Faster connection speeds are transforming the doctor/patient relationship, integrating electronic communications into medical care. From the comfort of their homes, patients wear remote medical sensors, transmitting their vital signs to health care providers. This data allows doctors and caregivers to monitor an array of vitals, dynamically manage treatment plans, and conduct a consult or intervention over webcam. The arrival of 5G networks will take this recent medical trend to the next level and provide a significant economic boost to the medical community. According to IHS Markit, 5G will enable more than $1 trillion dollars in products and services for the global health care sector.

How will this affect you? 5G represents a whole new way you’ll accomplish digital networking and is likely to upgrade your health care experiences. It’ll help you maintain your wellness through three primary areas of capabilities: Massive Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), and mission critical services. All three will come together, delivering a holistic, personalized view of the patient anytime and anywhere.  .... " 

Radiologist Case Study of AI and Professional Jobs

Useful thoughts about how professional expertise might or might not be replaced.  Augmented, but not replaced?  With good detail.    We examined similar professional applications in healthcare in previous AI efforts.

AI Will Change Radiology, but It Won’t Replace Radiologists
Thomas H. Davenport, Keith J. Dreyer, DO   in HBR.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to speculation that AI might one day replace human radiologists. Researchers have developed deep learning neural networks that can identify pathologies in radiological images such as bone fractures and potentially cancerous lesions, in some cases more reliably than an average radiologist. For the most part, though, the best systems are currently on par with human performance and are used only in research settings.

That said, deep learning is rapidly advancing, and it’s a much better technology than previous approaches to medical image analysis. This probably does portend a future in which AI plays an important role in radiology. Radiological practice would certainly benefit from systems that can read and interpret multiple images quickly, because the number of images has increased much faster over the last decade than the number of radiologists. Hundreds of images can be taken for one patient’s disease or injury. Imaging and radiology are expensive, and any solution that could reduce human labor, lower costs, and improve diagnostic accuracy would benefit patients and physicians alike. ... "

What does this mean for radiologists? Some medical students have reportedly decided not to specialize in radiology because they fear the job will cease to exist. We’re confident, however, that the great majority of radiologists will continue to have jobs in the decades to come — jobs that will be altered and enhanced by AI. One of us (Keith) is a radiologist and artificial intelligence researcher, and the other (Thomas) has researched the impact of AI on jobs for several years. We see several reasons why radiologists won’t be disappearing from the labor force, which we describe below. We also believe that several of these factors will inhibit the large-scale automation of other jobs supposedly threatened by AI. ... "

Decision Support for Health Data

Good overview talk this morning on the complexity of gathering and analyzing health data for decision support.  With some emphasis on dementia data.   'AI' is used here as a description of the analytcs used, as well as the direct decision process.   Like that.  Plans are to have a followup talk on this topic

Speaker:  Mark van Gils:  “AI for Decision Support in Health” VTT Finland

Slides are here.   Full voice /video recording will be placed here later

Electronic Skins as Health Sensors

More novel health sensors.

Electronic skin can display a heartbeat on your hand 
You'd know someone's health just by looking at them.

By Jon Fingas, @jonfingas in Engadget.

Electronic skins might not only detect health troubles in the near future, but display them for the world to see. University of Tokyo researchers have developed an e-skin that can measure vital signs like your heartbeat and display them in real time on a skin display. The design blends a breathable nanomesh electrode and stretchable wiring with an array of micro LEDs that can output basic images bending with your body. Others know right away if you need help -- they'd just have to look at your hand (or anywhere else the sensor works) to get an idea of what's wrong. The sensor can pair with a smartphone and transmit its info to the cloud, too. ...   Dai Nippon Printing

(Update)   More in Digital Trends.

Brain Pacemaker

Is something that can be described as a 'brain pacemaker' a viable idea?  Brains are very different from hearts.   From my connection to Ideaconnection.  With video.

Brain Pacemaker Could Treat Alzheimer's
An innovative brain pacemaker could offer treatment for the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Being investigated by a team from Ohio State University, the system relies on deep brain stimulation (DBS) to deliver mild electrical stimulation to the frontal regions of the brain. According to neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, who is conducting the clinical trials, the procedure “holds promise for improving connectivity, cognitive and functional performance, and should be further studied in Alzheimer's disease."   ... " 

Challenges for AI Redesigning Healthcare

Six Challenges To Tackle Before Artificial Intelligence Redesigns Healthcare in Medical Futurist

The potential of artificial intelligence for making healthcare better is indisputable. The question is how to integrate it successfully into our healthcare systems. For doing so, we have to overcome technical, medical limitations, as well as regulatory obstacles, soothe ethical concerns and mitigate the tendency to oversell the technology. The very first step should be to familiarize with what A.I. truly means. In our latest e-book, A Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, we summarized everything you need to know, so now, let’s look at the second step: the challenges to overcome! 

The transformative power of A.I. in healthcare

We have written extensively about the potential of artificial intelligence for redesigning healthcare. How it could help medical professionals in designing treatment plans and finding the best-suited methods for every patient. How it could assist repetitive, monotonous tasks, so physicians and nurses can concentrate on their actual jobs instead of e.g. fighting the tread-wheel of bureaucracy. By what means A.I. could prioritize e-mails in doctors’ inboxes or keep them up-to-date with the help of finding the latest and most relevant scientific studies in seconds. How its transformative power makes it as important as the stethoscope, the symbol of modern medicine, which appeared in the 19th century.

There are already great examples for its use in several hospitals: Google DeepMind launched a partnership with the UK’s National Health Service to improve the process of delivering care with digital solutions. In June 2017,  DeepMind expanded its services – first of all, its data management app, Streams, to another UK hospital. IBM Watson is used at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital as part of a science and technology facilities council project being run by the Hartree Centre. We asked the first experiences of physicians with the technology and gave an overview of the ever-expanding line of companies who are extensively investing in the development of the technology recognizing its transformative capability in healthcare.

However, the question we always have to face is how we translate the vast potential of artificial intelligence into everyday life. After the very first step – getting to know the most possible about A.I. in healthcare -, we should get a clearer picture of the obstacles.

Get the e-book here to read about the best companies, the way A.I. will redesign healthcare, the practical examples and ethical challenges! .... "

Smart Pills Approved

An old idea we talked in the innovation centers:

Smart Pills Are Headed to American Patients
The FDA has approved America’s first digital pill. The tablets, called Abilify MyCite, are an antipsychotic which can be used to treat schizophrenia and some cases of bipolar disorder. But unlike a regular pill, they contain a small ingestible sensor … " 

Hype of Virtual Medicine

Good points are made here,  in particular are systems like smartphones, effective at addicting us otherwise, useful for health habits?   WSJ article:

The Hype of Virtual Medicine
High-tech health care hasn’t proved effective at changing patients’ bad habits.... 

On the State of Healthcare Robotics

Very good overview,  with recent advances and challenges.

Healthcare Robotics   by Laurel D. Riek 

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 11, Pages 68-78
10.1145/3127874

The use of robots in healthcare represents an exciting opportunity to help a large number of people. Robots can be used to enable people with cognitive, sensory, and motor impairments, help people who are ill or injured, support caregivers, and aid the clinical workforce. This article highlights several recent advancements on these fronts, and discusses their impact on stakeholders. It also outlines several key technological, logistical, and design challenges faced in healthcare robot adoption, and suggests possible avenues for overcoming them. ...   "

Overview video:  https://vimeo.com/236438003

Amazon, Microsoft and Healthcare

Will it be head to head or collaborative?  Microsoft  has already said they were collaborating with Alexa systems in their recent meeting.  Future health systems may need to do more listening than speaking.    More below:

Amazon may be going head-to-head with Microsoft in healthcare
Amazon isn't the only one of the big cloud vendors looking to expand its healthcare footprint. Microsoft's been there, done that, and is continuing to invest in the space.....   

 By Mary Jo Foley for All About Microsoft

3D Printing Human Body Parts

3D-Printing Human Body Parts    By Keith Kirkpatrick 



Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 10, Pages 15-17 

The advent of three-dimensional (3D) printing is already yielding benefits in many fields by improving the speed and efficiency of product development, prototyping, and manufacturing, while also enabling true on-off customization to suit individual needs. While this is certainly a boon for manufacturers, 3D printing holds even greater promise when considering the possibilities for creating body parts or tissues to replace or repair organs or limbs that have worn out, become damaged, or have been lost to due injury or disease.

Indeed, significant ongoing research is being conducted at the university level into the use of 3D printing to create a variety of replacement parts for aspects of the human anatomy. .... "

Alexa as Companion for Hospital Stay

An example of AI and chatbot digital assistants being tested for hospital patient interaction.  See the tag below: 'Hospital Virtual Assistants'  for more diverse examples and coverage.   I will continue to use this tag in coming days.   Please pass along other examples you may have.

Alexa: 24/7 Companion for a Long Hospital Stay   by Richard Satterwhite

Patient Engagement Specialist, Office of the Patient/Family Experience ...  "  

Robotics in Hospital Operations

Continuing my look at Hospital Operations and AI/Robotics/Assistants,  especially with regard to patient interaction and comfort.

Adoption of Robotics Into a Hospital's Daily Operations Requires Broad Cooperation  VTT Technical Research Center

Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland have analyzed deploying a logistics robot system at the Seinajoki Central Hospital in South Ostrobothnia, Finland, with the goal of cutting transportation costs, improving supplies availability, and mitigating congestion in hospital hallways via 24/7 deliveries. The researchers found the system's success relied on joint planning and dialogue between occupational groups and stakeholders. Of particular importance was accounting for the interdependencies between various players, along with their roles in the hospital's core task. The researchers note the smooth process of robotic adoption overall demands careful planning, piloting, and implementation. "As the system is expanded with new robots and types of deliveries, even more guidance, communication, and dialogue is needed," says VTT's Inka Lappalainen. "Joint planning that brings various players to the same table ensures that the system's implementation goes as smoothly as possible, making it easier to achieve the desired overall benefits." ...  '