Getting Great Science to Market
Disseminating Medical Expertise to Areas that Need it Most
Replacing physicians has been cited as an aim of artificial-intelligence-based approaches to health care. Yet beyond the hype and hyperbole, there is a much more likely — and worthy — application of AI to medicine: infusing clinical expertise into regions where doctors are in short supply. A key case in point: the global shortage of…
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FIRST LOOK: Identification of Healthcare Risks in COPD Patients Using CT and X-ray Images
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most common respiratory conditions that affects more than 22 million Americans; it has climbed to be the third leading cause of death and accounts for $32 billion in associated healthcare cost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLkXqGk8bIM COPD remains underdiagnosed, and its associated comorbidities include cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and lung…
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CRISPR and ZFN, Two Promising Gene-Editing Platforms
Though the underlying mechanism is said to have been initially discovered in 1987, the potential to use CRISPR/Cas9 (“CRISPR”) as a gene editing therapy has recently enthralled the media since its first application in 2013[1]; touting its “blockbuster” potential to “revolutionize” modern medicine as we know it. While the application of this underlying biological mechanism…
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Getting Back to Face Time: AI Tools that Help Reduce Physicians’ Computer Use
Just as computers have propelled major advances in modern medicine, their presence has also become a significant burden. That’s because the amount of time physicians now spend on the computer — reviewing clinical data and completing required documentation in electronic health records (EHRs) — has soared. It is estimated that physicians spend roughly half of…
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Minimizing the Threats of Antimicrobial Resistance and Infections Associated with Antibiotic Use
The introduction of effective antibiotics in the 1940s ushered in an era of optimism with rapid declines in deaths due to infections. Since that time, however, antibiotic resistance has emerged rapidly, and too few antibiotics are making it through the development pipeline. That means once curable infections could soon become more virulent and even untreatable.…
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FIRST LOOK: Surgical Fingerprints: Real-time Analysis of Intraoperative Events
Intraoperative adverse events (IAEs), such as bowel/vascular injury, are estimated to occur in 2% of operations. IAEs can exact a toll on patient quality of life and costs, with average admission charges estimated to be 41% higher for patients who experience IAEs. Up to two-thirds of surgical errors occur intraoperatively, and 86% of these are…
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Harnessing the Power of Digital Pathology
Through its decades-long practice of digitizing clinical images, radiology is providing an early proving ground for machine learning-based approaches for disease detection, diagnosis, and prognosis. With a vast, rich pool of radiological images, researchers have access to the raw material needed to develop and hone new disease-detection algorithms, which are helping to drive the AI…
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Bringing “Smart” Machines to Medicine
Self-driving cars are poised to disrupt the transportation industry, and there is a similar revolution underway in health care. This effort seeks to engineer a new generation of “smart” medical equipment that melds scanning with interpretation, monitoring with treatment, and merges data from disparate devices into a common, readily interpretable stream. The goal: to help…
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Copyright 101: learn how to protect your creative works.
What: Copyrights protect original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression and this really speaks to what kinds of things are “eligible” for copyright protection. But to put it more simply, copyrights protect the expression of ideas. If we want to have a firm grasp of what copyrights really are, we’re going…
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Reading the Tea Leaves of Cancer Immunotherapy
The immune system protects the body from a host of foreign invaders. Over the last few years, therapies that leverage these defenses to fight cancer — so-called cancer immunotherapies — have yielded impressive outcomes in combating some forms of the disease. Yet as promising as these therapies are, they currently help only a small subset…
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FIRST LOOK: bloodTyper: Blood Group Typing using Next Generation Sequencing
Blood transfusion is one of the most common therapies administered in US hospitals, but sensitization to red blood cell (RBC) and platelet (PLT) antigens can lead to serious complications in prenatal medicine and transfusion. Although there are over 300 known RBC and 33 PLT antigens, current testing only includes matching the patient and donor for…
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FIRST LOOK: Leveraging Machine Learning for Personalized Cancer Treatments
It is not obvious how decades of hard won biological knowledge can be incorporated into building machine learning algorithms for predicting how a drug will affect a patient. We study this problem from theoretical, computational, and practical angles. Click here to watch Dr. Craft’s First Look presentation. Our computational studies provide strong evidence that incorporating…
Read MoreFrom Innovation to Commercialization – Bridging the Gap
In a world where science, technology, and innovation run parallel to the entrepreneurial spirit, a bridge is often needed to connect expertise, knowledge and wisdom to the lifesaving inventions that patients need most. That’s why we launched the BRIDGES blog. Launched in December 2017, BRIDGES is a collaborative resource where Innovation staff, technology experts, investors,…
Read MoreCollaboration Agreement Primer: Basics for Busy PIs
As a busy PI conducting research, have you ever wondered why your institution asks you to complete certain agreements related to your research and what do they all mean. In a recent article in Nature Biotechnology, Colm Lawler, PhD, Senior Licensing Manager and his co-authors attempt to provide a guide for navigating the alphabet soup…
Read MoreBWH ED Redesign to Help Cancer Patients and Researchers
A unique challenge of the emergency department (ED) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has become the catalyst for a new project designed to improve emergency care for oncology patients and develop new technologies for the ED. BWH is about to launch a four-year, $52 million renovation and expansion project. Approximately two-thirds of that funding will…
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Can Personal Devices Improve Your Health?
Digital devices permeate our lives. For most of our waking hours, we sport mini-computers strapped to our wrists or tucked into a pocket. We rely on these gadgets for an ever-expanding array of tasks, and without them (or their sufficiently juiced batteries), modern life can come to a screeching halt. It seems almost natural, then,…
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FIRST LOOK: Leveraging AI and biological networks to functionally interpret vast genetic datasets
With the unprecedented ability to sequence genomes and to genotype millions of patients’ functional interpretation of genetic data is now one of the major bottlenecks in science and healthcare. This is a key constraint on our efforts toward biological understanding and patient-specific therapeutic intervention in human diseases. In parallel, high throughput technologies in transcriptomics and…
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FIRST LOOK: Mass Spectrometry Imaging for Surgical Pathology and Oncology
Mass spectrometry provides multiple options for the direct biomolecular characterization of tissue to support clinical decision-making and provides significant insight in the development of drugs targeting tumors of the central nervous system. Using an array of mass spectrometry (MS) applications, we rapidly analyze tumor markers ranging from small metabolites to proteins from surgical tissue for…
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