Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a crucial component of healthcare to help augment physicians and make them more efficient. In medical imaging, it is helping radiologists more efficiently manage PACS worklists, enable structured reporting, auto detect injuries and diseases, and to pull in relevant prior exams and patient data. In cardiology, AI is helping automate tasks and measurements on imaging and in reporting systems, guides novice echo users to improve imaging and accuracy, and can risk stratify patients. AI includes deep learning algorithms, machine learning, computer-aided detection (CAD) systems, and convolutional neural networks. 

Cheers! AI augments hearing aids with virtual microphones ‘mounted’ on the forehead

The experimental approach delivers a more natural sound by correcting for the need to place microphones at impractical points like the forehead.

Out of many, one: COVID database takes root, epitomizes the national ideal

MIT charts the encouraging story behind—and in front of—the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C ).

Will Nurse Grace cheer patients up or scare them away?

Empathetic, affable, visually unthreatening and coolly competent in several healthcare tasks, a newly trained nurse named Grace has made a head-turning debut.

Storytelling robots send parents of young children into AI’s ‘uncanny valley’

Many parents would let their children be read to by robots as long as the device didn’t project a little too much lifelikeness.

New tools, techniques emerge to extend AI’s adaptability in cloud-based drug discovery

Because they learn as they go, machine learning models for drug discovery have to be continuously re-trained for changing conditions in drug production processes.

AI teams with fMRI to advance the state of deep brain stimulation

The system hit 88% accuracy at optimizing stimulation settings, as confirmed by brain-response patterns on neuroimaging as well as visibly observable symptom improvement in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

2-way BCI gives greater limb control to people with paralysis

Bioengineers have developed a brain-computer interface that replicates the sense of touch, allowing a robotic arm and hand to not only receive command signals from the brain but also send back signals of stimulation.

International group calls for more nursing in healthcare AI—and vice versa

The profession of nursing is something of a sleeping giant within the global village of healthcare AI, according to an interdisciplinary collaborative of healthcare workers from North America and Europe.

Around the web

U.S. health systems are increasingly leveraging digital health to conduct their operations, but how health systems are using digital health in their strategies can vary widely.

When human counselors are unavailable to provide work-based wellness coaching, robots can substitute—as long as the workers are comfortable with emerging technologies and the machines aren’t overly humanlike.

A vendor that supplies EHR software to public health agencies is partnering with a health-tech startup in the cloud-communications space to equip state and local governments for managing their response to the COVID-19 crisis.