Health care

Prof. Lydia Bourouiba speaks with BBC CrowdSource presenter Marnie Chesterton about her work in understanding how bodily fluids such as snot and spittle spread after leaving the body using high speed cameras.  “What is very clear is that we emit… droplets of a continuum of sizes but they are not coming out alone,” explains Bourouiba. “They are coming out with an air that is in our lungs, that is hot and moist and turbulent, which changes the physical dynamics of the emission and how the drops will evolve.”

Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have created an artificial intelligence program that can accurately identify a patient’s race based off medical images, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. “The reason we decided to release this paper is to draw attention to the importance of evaluating, auditing, and regulating medical AI,” explains Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi.

During the AI Cures Conference, Prof. Regina Barzilay spoke with Food and Drug Administration senior staff fellow Amir Khan about how the agency intends to regulate artificial intelligence in medicine, reports Casey Ross for STAT.  “’My thinking is that models should be regulated based on their functionality, and not necessarily on the input data they use,” said Barzilay. 

J-PAL research manager Jesse Gubb writes for STAT about how voluntary innovation tests can lead to providers favoring profitable programs over what is best for patients and can make potential reforms harder to evaluate. “The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation is in the rare position of being empowered to develop innovative payment models and prospectively evaluate them,” writes Gubb. “Mandatory, national randomized evaluations ensure that the already significant effort to develop the models will yield the rigorous evidence needed to support decisions on whether to scale and adopt them broadly.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude about his experience working on the Affordable Care Act over twelve years ago, and how he thinks health coverage can be improved moving forward.

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about his latest research on a program designed to increase health care access to immigrants across New York. “We reached out through a variety of mechanisms through non-government organizations through social media and we offered them a program to improve their healthcare. We brought them in and what we did was basically just connect them with doctors,” says Gruber.

PBS Nova premiered “Augmented,” a documentary film that features Prof. Hugh Herr and his research team’s work in developing brain controlled robotic limbs and reimagining amputation procedures. “Herr is teaming up with an injured climber and a surgeon at a leading Boston hospital to test a new approach to surgical amputation that allows prosthetic limbs to move and feel like the real thing,” writes PBS Nova.

STAT reporters Katie Palmer and Casey Ross spotlight how Prof. Regina Barzilay has developed an AI tool called Mirai that can identify early signs of breast cancer from mammograms. “Mirai’s predictions were rolled into a screening tool called Tempo, which resulted in earlier detection compared to a standard annual screening,” writes Palmer and Ross.

WBUR reporter Pamela Reynolds spotlights a new exhibit of Sharona Franklin’s work, which will be on display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center this coming February. “Franklin presents a new installation combining the themes of chronic illness with bioethics, environmental harm and holistic approaches to healthcare,” writes Reynolds.

Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Good Morning America about her work developing a new AI tool that could “revolutionize early breast cancer detection” by identifying patients at high risk of developing the disease. “If this technology is used in a uniform way,” says Barzilay, “we can identify early who are high-risk patients and intervene.”

Washington Post reporter Steve Zeitchik spotlights Prof. Regina Barzilay and graduate student Adam Yala’s work developing a new AI system, called Mirai, that could transform how breast cancer is diagnosed, “an innovation that could seriously disrupt how we think about the disease.” Zeitchik writes: “Mirai could transform how mammograms are used, open up a whole new world of testing and prevention, allow patients to avoid aggressive treatments and even save the lives of countless people who get breast cancer.”

NPR’s Ted Radio Hour spotlights the work of Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18, who is trying to address the gaps that exist in women’s health data through a smart bra that can be used to acquire physiological data. Chong’s startup BloomerTech has “built medical-grade textile sensors that can adapt to multiple bra styles and sizes for continuous, reliable and repeatable data all around her torso and her heart.”

STAT reporter Katie Palmer writes that MIT researchers have developed a new machine learning model that can "flag treatments for sepsis patients that are likely to lead to a ‘medical dead-end,/ the point after which a patient will die no matter what care is provided.”

Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, and Luke Yoquinto, a research associate at the AgeLab, emphasize the importance of increased investment in aging-related research in an article for The Boston Globe. Coughlin and Yoquinto call for “ramping up age-related disease research across the board: not just in health care and robotics, but also in smart-home tech, user design, transportation, workplace technologies, education and training, and nutrition. R&D in these fields won’t just improve lives; it will also strengthen tomorrow’s economy.”

Writing for STAT, lecturer Juhan Sonin and his colleagues underscore the importance of individuals owning the rights to their own health data. “Data ownership gives each of us the keys to our health puzzle and insight into how our data is used outside medical appointments to further research, innovation, and better health care for all,” writes Sonin and his co-authors. “It gives us the keys we need to care for ourselves and our loved ones, and to build health in our communities and our country at large.”