Posts tagged medicine

kqedscience: Teen Develops Computer Algorithm to Diagnose Leukemia “Brittany Wenger isn’t your average high-school senior: She taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia. The 18-year-old student from Sarasota, Fla. built a custom, cloud-based “artificial neural network” to find patterns in genetic expression profiles to diagnose patients with an aggressive form of cancer called mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL). Simply put, this means Wenger taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia by creating a diagnostic tool for doctors to use.” Brittany is also a TEDx speaker! She spoke at TEDxCERN this May, and TEDxWomen in 2012.See our coverage of TEDxCERN here, and — below — watch Brittany’s TEDxWomen talk about Cloud4Cancer, a computer program she designed to diagnose breast cancer more accurately and less invasively.

kqedscience:

Teen Develops Computer Algorithm to Diagnose Leukemia

“Brittany Wenger isn’t your average high-school senior: She taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia.

The 18-year-old student from Sarasota, Fla. built a custom, cloud-based “artificial neural network” to find patterns in genetic expression profiles to diagnose patients with an aggressive form of cancer called mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL). Simply put, this means Wenger taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia by creating a diagnostic tool for doctors to use.”

Brittany is also a TEDx speaker! She spoke at TEDxCERN this May, and TEDxWomen in 2012.

See our coverage of TEDxCERN here, and — below — watch Brittany’s TEDxWomen talk about Cloud4Cancer, a computer program she designed to diagnose breast cancer more accurately and less invasively.

kqedscience

Epilepsy is a really, really common problem… [There are] 60 million people worldwide with epilepsy… [and only] about two-thirds are adequately treated with currently available medication…

The medications carry their own special problems. We’ve got to ingest these medications that soak your whole body and brain — and your body doesn’t like them. They cause bad side effects, most particularly, side effects in the central nervous system. They slow your mind; they affect your ability to perform; and as well they have lots of other effects: tension on the liver, bones, and other tissue. So, they’re not good drugs.

…A lot of the problem with epilepsy relates to its unpredictability … we have to soak people in medications to prevent seizures that might be occurring only for a few minutes a year, but in those few minutes, disrupts their entire life. Prevents them from driving. Stops them working. Threatens their safety. Costs their life sometimes. So the unpredictability is a major part of the disability …it necessitates chronic drug administration for an intermittent problem…

So we’ve been working with a group based in the United States around seizure prediction and this has brought some really unique insights: [A person has a box implanted] — which sits underneath their clavicle, their collarbone — which records information that is drawn from these electrodes that we’ve placed over their brain through a hole that we’ve made in their skull…It transmits information to a small pager-sized device that they hold and that has a series of lights on it: a blue light to indicate a very low risk of seizures, a white light for a moderate risk, and a red light for a very high risk for seizures…
And this, if effective, would remove a lot of the disability for people. It might let them get to work, play sports — conceivably — even drive. It might be that you can provide therapies when their status changes on the recording…Suddenly, this changes everything.
…Conceivably we could construct polymer implants, which could not only release [an anticonvulsant] drug, but detect the seizure, and use the energy in the seizure itself to release the therapy. And this would be remarkable.

Mark Cook, chair of medicine and director of neurosciences at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, speaks at TEDxUWollongong on his research on developing new treatments for epilepsy. Watch his whole talk here »

Drones for good: Andreas Raptopoulos at TEDxHelvetia

Much has been said about the destructive capabilities of autonomous flying robots — also known as drones — and less about their potential for good.

TEDx speaker Andreas Raptopoulos wants to start that conversation, and at TEDxHelvetia he did, by introducing Matternet — a project designed to use small, flying autonomous robots to deliver medicine to places inaccessible by typical modes of transportation.

From his talk:

One billion people do not have access to all-season roads. One-seventh of the Earth’s population are disconnected from all socioeconomic activity for some part of the year. 

They cannot get medicine reliably. They cannot get goods. They cannot get their goods to market in order to find a sustainable path out of poverty.

Now mainstream thinking suggests that these nations should invest in building roads — following the lead of the developed world. It’s a pretty tall order. It’s estimated that in some countries, it may take them 50 years to catch up…

We saw that and we thought, ‘…There has to be another way.’ So we asked the question, ‘Can these countries leapfrog?’ After all, many of these nations have excellent telecommunications today, but they’ve never put copper lines in the ground. Could we do the same for transportation? We believe we can.

Imagine this scenario: You are in a maternity ward in Mali and you have a newborn in need of urgent medication. What do you do? Well…you place a request by mobile phone; somebody gets that request immediately: that part works. But the medicine may take days to arrive: that’s the part that’s broken.

We believe we can fix this. We believe we can deliver the medicine within hours — or even minutes — with an electric, autonomous, medical supply vehicle…

The beauty of this technology is its autonomy. There’s no pilot needed to fly this vehicle. They fly using GPS waypoints from one landing station to the next. Once they arrive at a landing station, they swap battery and load automatically. This is the heart of our system…

It turns out that it’s amazingly cost-effective. In order to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers, the cost is only 24 cents…

We believe that Matternet can do for the transportation of matter what the Internet did for the flow of information.

Says TED speaker Ray Kurzweil of the project — in conversation with Fast Company, “The developed world has a huge lead over the developing world in infrastructure but our strategy should be to leapfrog these already obsolete and crumbling systems with 21st century solutions. That’s what we did with phone systems as developing societies went right to wireless and will never put in a wired land line system. Bits are already being widely distributed to emerging economies. Matternet will do that for atoms.”

Matternet photo via Electronic Products

Psychiatric disorders — like autism, depression, and schizophrenia — take a terrible toll on human suffering. We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body.Think about it: in 2013 — the second decade of the millennium — if you’re concerned about a cancer diagnosis, and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies, and blood tests. In 2013, if you’re concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor and what do you get? A questionnaire.Part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as ‘chemical imbalances’ in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup.But that can’t be the answer, because these drugs actually don’t work all that well. A lot of people won’t take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects, because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will drip into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good. —From Dr. David Anderson’s TEDxCaltech talk,”Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals,” a TEDx editor’s pick this week.

Psychiatric disorders — like autism, depression, and schizophrenia — take a terrible toll on human suffering. We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body.

Think about it: in 2013 — the second decade of the millennium — if you’re concerned about a cancer diagnosis, and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies, and blood tests. In 2013, if you’re concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor and what do you get? A questionnaire.

Part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as ‘chemical imbalances’ in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.

This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup.

But that can’t be the answer, because these drugs actually don’t work all that well. A lot of people won’t take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects, because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will drip into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good.

—From Dr. David Anderson’s TEDxCaltech talk,”Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals,” a TEDx editor’s pick this week.