medicine

Patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center may receive cancer diagnoses and treatment with the help of IBM's Watson supercomputer by the end of 2013.

Watson would make diagnoses and suggest treatment approaches that take into account individual patient concerns, the Associated Press reported today.

Using its natural-language processing powers, the artificial intelligence system will study textbooks, oncology studies, and medical records if patients give permission. An advisory panel will test its assessments of increasingly complicated cancer cases. … Read more

The New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world (it celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2012), is now offering up its content on the iPad.

The journal says the iPad edition of its weekly, peer-reviewed content includes audio, video, expandable images, and features such as sharing, searching, and notating.

"We know that you're busy, and you want to have the relevant clinical information you need, right at your fingertips," reported the journal on its blog this week.

The app is available free for download at the iTunes App Store. Current journal … Read more

"Gorilla Glass" could one day become a household phrase, but Corning has even larger ideas.

"A Day Made of Glass 2" is a montage of "how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world," according to Corning. It is mind-blowing to imagine everyday objects suddenly having rich, interactive displays and multiple functionalities.

After watching the video, I began to think about how intelligent glass, installed on a broad scale, could change the world. There are two key integrations: in the education and medical fields.

In the video, kids sit in rows … Read more

The "Star Trek" universe may be beloved by millions, but it's entirely fictional. Yet one element of Gene Rodenberry's timeless creation may actually help people with their health care decisions in real life.

The problem faced by millions of people around the world, especially in the third world, and in rural areas of the first world, is that there's not always a doctor around to help figure out what's wrong with you--and sometimes, one isn't even necessary. Sometimes, the right technology could help us determine what's going on in our bodies.

That'… Read more

If researchers at the University of Illinois have their say, bandages are about to get a whole lot cooler.

A team of engineers has created a bandage that in just one week not only encourages new blood vessel growth but helps guide that growth as well.

"The ability to pattern functional blood vessels at this scale in living tissue has not been demonstrated before," co-principal investigator and electrical and computing engineering professor Rashid Bashir says in a school news release.

The team, whose findings will grace the cover of a January 2012 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--At the Launch 'Pad conference today, two back-to-back presenters showed how they are trying to modernize the doctor/patient relationship with iPad apps.

The more ambitious and better-established company, Dr Chrono, is an iPad-centric, complete office automation suite aimed primarily at small medical practices. Patients may encounter it when they're asked to sign in at their doctor's office; it will collect the insurance information and medical history data that most offices collect on generations-old paper forms.

But doctors can use the app for ordering labs, handling billing, and even taking medical notes.

What's interesting to … Read more

Medify CEO Derek Streat is trying to resolve the combination of data overload and knowledge underload that patients and families often suffer from when they have to deal with a chronic medical issue, like cancer, diabetes, or autism.

"There's no Kayak in this space," Streat says. "It's very 1999. There's WebMD, and thousands of Google results." He calls it the "missing middle" problem. You can get over-simplified pablum or a sea of highly technical data. But it's the information in the middle--the synthesis of hundreds of current research reports, filtered … Read more

There hasn't been another major radioactive leak, but soon we could see flesh wounds glowing in the dark. Researchers at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. have developed a gel that glows under ultraviolet light when it comes in contact with many kinds of bacteria.

The gel also appears to be effective in fighting the bacteria at the same time.

"The polymers (in the gel) incorporate a fluorescent dye and are engineered to recognize and attach to bacteria, collapsing around them as they do so," Sheffield Professor Sheila MacNeil explains in a statement. "This change in polymer shape generates a fluorescent signal that we've been able to detect using a handheld UV lamp."

Project lead Dr. Steve Rimmer adds that the technology could help reduce the overuse of antibiotics. In testing, the gel has been able to detect the presence of serious bacterias including Salmonella, E. Coli, MRSA, and meningitis.… Read more

We've written about mirrors that tell us more than whether we have a piece of spinach stuck between our teeth. A year ago, a Harvard-MIT student showed off a mirror that's able to read certain vital signs.

Now The New York Times Research & Development Lab is taking things a step further--bringing body tracking, shopping, news, and of course advertising to one's most intimate of places: the bathroom.

The group's "magic mirror" uses LCD and Kinect technology (it's really more of a computer with a reflective surface) that lets users browse the Web while brushing their teeth.

How is this better than using a smartphone in the bathroom? For one, it's hands-free. In fact, in the group's demo, one of the designers simply places a box of meds on the mirror's small ledge; it uses RFID tagging to recognize the type of meds and pull up information about dosages and where to buy more.… Read more