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Data Crunchers to the Rescue

Data Crunchers to the Rescue | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From nautil.us - June 24, 2021 5:31 AM

Until recently, clinicians didn’t have good tools for personalized genetic analysis.

 

But that’s changing, thanks to quantitative biology. The discipline merges mathematical, statistical, and computational methods to study living organisms.

 

Quantitative biologists develop algorithms that chew through big datasets and try to make sense of them. In case of rare genetic disorders, that means analyzing loads of data from multiple patients to understand how their genes work in tandem with each other.

 

Researchers hope to give clinicians a peek at what their patients’ genes are doing, helping devise personalized therapies.

 

In recent years, DNA-sequencing technologies have matured to the point where a smart algorithm can parse genetic data from multiple patients and their families—and find tale-telling trends much faster than experiments on rodents can

 

read the entire post at https://nautil.us/issue/102/hidden-truths/data-crunchers-to-the-rescue

 

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Digital heart model can help predict future heart health - The Digital Twin

Digital heart model can help predict future heart health - The Digital Twin | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From medicalxpress.com - March 17, 2021 4:28 PM

In recent times, researchers have increasing found that the power of computers and artificial intelligence is enabling more accurate diagnosis of a patient's current heart health and can provide an accurate projection of future heart health, potential treatments and disease prevention

 

In a paper published in the European Heart Journal, researchers from King's College London, show how linking computer and statistical models can improve clinical decisions relating to the heart.

The research team is lead by Dr. Pablo Lamata.

 

In his statement he said that "We found that making appropriate clinical decisions is not only about data, but how to combine data with the knowledge that we have built up through years of research."

 

The Digital Twin

The team have coined the phrase the Digital Twin to describe this integration of the two models, a computerised version of our heart which represents human physiology and individual data.

 

"The Digital Twin will shift treatment selection from being based on the state of the patient today to optimising the state of the patient tomorrow,

 

The idea is that the electronic health record will be growing into a more detailed description of what we could call a digital avatar, a digital representation of how the heart is working.

 

This could mean that a trip to the doctor's office could be a more digital experience. "

 

Mechanistic models see researchers applying the laws of physics and maths to simulate how the heart will behave.

 

Statistical models require researchers to look at past data to see how the heart will behave in similar conditions and infer how it will do it over time.

 

Models can pinpoint the most valuable piece of diagnostic data and can also reliably infer biomarkers that cannot be directly measured or that require invasive procedures.

 

"It's like the weather: understanding better how it works, helps us to predict it. And with the heart, models will also help us to predict how better or worse it will get if we interfere with it."

 

read the original unedited article at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-03-digital-heart-future-health.html

 

nrip's insight:

We already extract numbers from the medical images and cardiac signals. What if we can combine these and process them through a model to infer something that we don't see in the data.

 

We obviously cannot touch a beating heart, but we can train these models with the rules and laws of the material properties to infer  importance pieces of diagnostic and prognostic information.

 

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Digital Strategies #HealthIT Must Prioritize During #COVID19

Digital Strategies #HealthIT Must Prioritize During #COVID19 | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From hitconsultant.net - June 28, 2020 5:19 AM

As healthcare providers battle an increasing influx of patients and dwindling inventory – including critical personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies like masks, ventilators, and hospital beds – they are relying more heavily on their digital tools and applications than ever before.

 

Prior to this recent pandemic, research shows that 84 percent of people have experienced problems with digital services in the last year.

 

In the middle of a global health crisis, there’s no tolerance for bad performance when it’s a matter of a patients’ health.

 

To improve these experiences, health IT professionals must leverage AI and machine learning to pinpoint the moment digital issues arise and automatically remediate issues.

 

This saves IT teams time and resources that could be spent creating new services that will further improve the patient and doctor’s experience during the crisis.

 

Digital strategies that HealthIT leaders must consider to support healthcare professionals regardless of where and when they are providing care.

 

  • Real-time analytics and monitoring
  • Remote monitoring

 

Read the entire article at

https://hitconsultant.net/2020/05/20/digital-strategies-healthit-must-prioritize-during-covid-19/#.Xvhd1JMzZPt

 

 

 

nrip's insight:

I believe HealthIT must focus on the following 3 at the moment -

- TeleHealth and Remote Patient Monitoring

- Early Warning and Disease Surveillance using Machine Learning algorithms

- Intelligent Self Screening and AI based Triaging

 

Contact me via @nrip on Twitter or Contact The HealthIT team at Plus91 to discuss

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Mobile tools to serve as first lines of defense for concerned consumers  #dermatology #mHealth - VisualDx officially launches Aysa

From www.mobihealthnews.com - October 5, 2018 12:49 AM

A lot of startups are starting to offer mobile tools to serve as “first lines of defense” for concerned consumers. A natural extension to patient education, they serve as the first line of diagnosis.

 

Dermatology is a particularly attractive area for this because of a national shortage of dermatologists in the United States.

 

Clinical decision support tool maker VisualDx officially launched Aysa, its first consumer-facing app, last month at Health 2.0 in San Francisco. The app allows users to upload pictures of skin lesions or rashes, enter some additional information about themselves and receive suggestions of what condition they might have and what actions to take next.

 

VisualDx stands out as a company that’s moving from provider-focused clinical decision support into the consumer world, which should lend it more credibility to its platform.

 

The app uses machine learning to identify skin conditions and make treatment suggestions.

 

services like this are crucial, even acknowledging their limitations, because people are already looking online for medical answers, so they might as well have the best ones possible.

 

CEO Dr. Art Papier in conversation with MobiHealthNews said 

“We know that everybody searches Google with their symptoms or they go to WebMD and use a symptom checker,” he said. “So the real question is how do you develop something that’s an educational symptom checker that’s safe? The art of this is to do a better job of educating so people know on a weekend, do I need to run to urgent care on a weekend, or can I get some better information that will help me make some decisions and then I’ll see the doctor later if necessary.”

 

read the original story at https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/visualdx-launches-aysa-consumer-facing-dermatology-app

 

nrip's insight:

Tech solutions which offer at-home services like this are crucial, because people are already looking online for medical answers, so they might as well have the best ones possible. It definitely helps one get an insight as to what to search for rather than search the whole world wide web and drive up paranoia.

 

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Analysis reveals SARS-CoV-2 infection causes deregulation of lung cell metabolism

Analysis reveals SARS-CoV-2 infection causes deregulation of lung cell metabolism | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From journals.plos.org - April 14, 2021 9:12 AM

A model has been developed by researchers at Indian Institute of Technology ,Kharagpur predicting alteration in metabolic reaction rates of lung cells post SARS-CoV-2 infection.

"We have used the gene expression of normal human bronchial cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 along with the macromolecular make-up of the virus to create this integrated genome-scale metabolic model. The growth rate predicted by the model showed a very high agreement with experimentally and clinically reported effects of SARS-CoV-2," said Dr Amit Ghosh, Assistant Professor, School of Energy Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur who coauthored the paper

 

The research would lead to a better understanding of metabolic reprogramming and aid the development of better therapeutics to deal with viral pandemics,

 

Summary:

Metabolic flux analysis in disease biology is opening up new avenues for therapeutic interventions. Numerous diseases lead to disturbance in the metabolic homeostasis and it is becoming increasingly important to be able to quantify the difference in interaction under normal and diseased condition.

 

While genome-scale metabolic models have been used to study those differences, there are limited methods to probe into the differences in flux between these two conditions. Our method of conducting a differential flux analysis can be leveraged to find which reactions are altered between the diseased and normal state.

 

We applied this to study the altered reactions in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infection. We further corroborated our results with other multi-omics studies and found significant agreement.

 

read the paper at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008860

 

 

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New Soft Contact Lens Diagnoses and Monitors Eye Diseases

New Soft Contact Lens Diagnoses and Monitors Eye Diseases | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From interestingengineering.com - March 12, 2021 4:49 AM

Commercial soft contact lenses have been on researchers' radar to help diagnose and monitor ocular diseases for a while, but they have proven tricky to use as typical sensors and electronics used for such uses normally require a hard, planar surface to function. Something a soft, curved, thin contact lens can't offer.

 

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. has created a soft contact lens that's capable of diagnosing and monitoring ocular diseases painlessly.

 

How?

The way the team managed to develop a soft contact lens for this purpose was by integrating ultrathin, stretchable biosensors with soft commercial contact lenses using wet adhesive bonding.

 

The biosensors embedded within the contact lenses record retinal activity from the surface of the eye. As these are regular contact lenses, no topical anesthesia to manage pain and safety, as is typical with current clinical diagnosis and monitoring settings, is required.

 

"This technology will allow doctors and scientists to better understand spontaneous retinal activity with significantly improved accuracy, reliability, and user comfort"

 

Read the press release about the lens at https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2021/Q1/soft-contact-lenses-eyed-as-new-solutions-to-monitor-ocular-diseases.html

 

Read the original completed unedited story at

https://interestingengineering.com/new-soft-contact-lens-diagnoses-and-monitors-eye-diseases

 

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Richard Platt's curator insight, March 12, 2021 2:15 PM

Commercial soft contact lenses have been on researchers' radar to help diagnose and monitor ocular diseases for a while, but they have proven tricky to use as typical sensors and electronics used for such uses normally require a hard, planar surface to function. Something a soft, curved, thin contact lens can't offer.  A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Purdue University in the U.S. has created a soft contact lens that's capable of diagnosing and monitoring ocular diseases painlessly. How? - The way the team managed to develop a soft contact lens for this purpose was by integrating ultrathin, stretchable biosensors with soft commercial contact lenses using wet adhesive bonding.  The biosensors embedded within the contact lenses record retinal activity from the surface of the eye. As these are regular contact lenses, no topical anesthesia to manage pain and safety, as is typical with the current clinical diagnosis and monitoring settings, is required.  "This technology will allow doctors and scientists to better understand spontaneous retinal activity with significantly improved accuracy, reliability, and user comfort"
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Automated malnutrition screening system for hospitalized children #NHITWeek

Automated malnutrition screening system for hospitalized children #NHITWeek | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From www.eurekalert.org - October 10, 2018 12:59 AM

A team of clinicians, dietitians and researchers has created an innovative automated program to screen for malnutrition in hospitalized children, providing daily alerts to healthcare providers so they can quickly intervene with appropriate treatment. The malnutrition screen draws on existing patient data in electronic health records (EHR)

 

"Undernutrition is extremely common in children with cancer--the population we studied in this project," said study leader Charles A. Phillips, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). "There is currently no universal, standardized approach to nutrition screening for children in hospitals, and our project is the first fully automated pediatric malnutrition screen using EHR data."

 

Phillips and a multidisciplinary team of fellow oncology clinicians, registered dietitians and quality improvement specialists co-authored a paper published Oct. 5, 2018 in the Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics.

 

The study team analyzed EHR data from inpatients at CHOP's 54-bed pediatric oncology unit over the period of November 2016 through January 2018, covering approximately 2,100 hospital admissions. The anthropometric measurements in the EHR included height, length, weight and body mass index. The researchers used software to take note of changes in those measurements, and used criteria issued by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, to evaluate each patient's risk of malnutrition.

 

For each child that the screening program judged to be at risk, the tool classified the risk as mild, moderate or severe. It then automatically generated a daily e-mail to hospital clinicians, listing each patient's name, medical record number, unit, and malnutrition severity level, among other data.

 

In the patient cohort, the researchers' automated screen calculated the overall prevalence of malnutrition at 42 percent for the entire period of study, consistent with the range expected from previous studies (up to about 65 percent for inpatient pediatric oncology patients). Overall severity levels for malnutrition were 47 percent in the mild category, 24 percent moderate and 29 percent severe; again, consistent with other research and clinical experience.

 

The study leader stated that:

 

This test study demonstrates the feasibility of using EHR data to create an automated screening tool for malnutrition in pediatric inpatients. Further research is needed to formally assess this screening tool, but it has the potential to identify at-risk patients in the early stages of malnutrition, so we can intervene quickly. In addition, this tool could be implemented to screen all pediatric patients for malnutrition, because it uses data common to all electronic medical records.

 

read the unedited original article at https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/chop-fam100918.php

 

nrip's insight:

Healthcare data is increasingly being analyzed. While we have written previously on AI, Prediction systems, automation, machine learning and other cool stuff, seemingly uncool technology is what provides the coolest benefits. 

 

But this article and the story behind is the perfect example of how technology can be most effective for improving healthcare workflows in 2018 and 2019. Further ahead the benefits of the previously mentioned cool techs will hopefully be starting to be realizable, but we must use automation and analysis to intervene in current workflows and make them more effective today as much as we can.

 

This directly benefits clinical staff, speeds up care and actually starts making EHR data directly beneficial to those pained by the process of generating it.

 

To know about how many such benefits can be extracted from uncool technologies, check out out websites to learn about Medixcel and talk to us in the comments below.

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An algorithm is spotting heart problems better than an expert doctor

An algorithm is spotting heart problems better than an expert doctor | healthcare technology | Scoop.it
From www.technologyreview.com - September 2, 2017 1:05 AM

It might not be long before algorithms routinely save lives—as long as doctors are willing to put ever more trust in machines.

 

An algorithm that spots heart arrhythmia shows how AI will revolutionize medicine—but patients must trust machines with their lives.

 

A team of researchers at Stanford University, led by Andrew Ng, a prominent AI researcher and an adjunct professor there, has shown that a machine-learning model can identify heart arrhythmias from an electrocardiogram (ECG) better than an expert.

 

The automated approach could prove important to everyday medical treatment by making the diagnosis of potentially deadly heartbeat irregularities more reliable. It could also make quality care more readily available in areas where resources are scarce.

 

The work is also just the latest sign of how machine learning seems likely to revolutionize medicine. In recent years, researchers have shown that machine-learning techniques can be used to spot all sorts of ailments, including, for example, breast cancer, skin cancer, and eye disease from medical images.

 

more at : https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608234/the-machines-are-getting-ready-to-play-doctor/

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