Japanese researchers recently demonstrated artificial intelligence software capable of identifying and analyzing polyps found during a colonoscopy in less than a second.

The endoscopic system uses a magnified view of a colorectal polyp to study its features and compare it with 30,000 endocytoscopic images used for machine learning.

Researchers said they were able to predict the pathology of the polyp in less than a second, with 86% accuracy, based on a study assessing more than 300 polyps.

"The most remarkable breakthrough with this system is that artificial intelligence enables real-time optical biopsy of colorectal polyps during colonoscopy, regardless of the endoscopists’ skill," said Dr. Yuichi Mori, a researcher from Showa University in Yokohama, Japan and study lead, in a statement.

Mori said researchers now want to work on a broader study aimed at creating a system that can automatically detect polyps.

Its value to the medical world is a key reason why supporters such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are excited about the future of artificial intelligence. During a Facebook Live chat in July, Zuckerberg discussed how AI can create safer cars and diagnose diseases earlier.

"I’m just much more optimistic in general on this," he said.
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Critics of AI, most notably Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said governments should regulate how artificial intelligence is built and used to prevent potential global disasters.

Pancreatic cancer has a meager survival rate, with just 9% of patients surviving past five years. The disease, which killed Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, is one of the hardest types of cancer to treat, but detecting and treating it early can make a big difference to survival rates. But researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a simple and incredibly accurate way to test for the cancer that people can administer themselves.

The team developed an app called BiliScreen, and with a smartphone's camera, it uses computer vision algorithms to detect levels of the chemical bilirubin in the whites of a person's eyes. With pancreatic cancer, bilirubin levels start to increase and eventually, it turns the whites of the eye yellow, which is also the case for hepatitis. However, when that yellowing becomes noticeable, the cancer is already very developed. BiliScreen can detect miniscule levels of bilirubin and provide users with an assessment of whether their levels are high enough to indicate possible disease. This is easier and cheaper than a blood test, which is the traditional test for the cancer and can be done before any symptoms start to show.
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To take lighting into account, the app can be used with either a special box that blocks out ambient light or paper glasses with colored squares around the edges that the app is calibrated to. With the box, BiliScreen was around 90% as accurate as a blood test in identifying concerning levels of bilirubin in a small, 70-person clinical study. 

Sometime in the last century, most professionals discovered that face-to-face meetings with clients weren't always necessary — or even desirable. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects and scores of other professional service providers discovered the phone. Then they unearthed email. Then video conferencing.
But not doctors. Most doctors today communicate with their patients the same way the Greek physician Galen did 2,000 years ago: one on one, in person.

Why is that?

One reason is unwise legislation. Another is resistance to change by the American Medical Association and state medical societies. A third reason is Medicare, whose payment practices tend to be copied by most employers and private insurers. But the biggest problem is that rank-and-file doctors have been unwilling to step into the modern age.

Thanks to the most recent legislative session, Texas became the last state in the union to allow physicians to consult by phone with patients they have never met. And that only came about after a long, hard struggle.

Take the case of Teladoc, a Dallas-based firm that provides telephone consultations to nearly 11 million patients nationwide. Say you are on a business trip and your allergy prescription runs out. You put in a call to Teladoc, and within 30 minutes you get a call back from a doctor who has access to your medical records. After a brief consultation, the doctor prescribes the medication you need.

Teladoc estimates that one-third of physician consultations don't require the doctor to be physically present. Further, a typical phone consultation costs about $40 to $50, compared with $130 for a family physician visit or $1,500 for a trip to the emergency room.

Great service? You would think so. But the Texas Medical Board (acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Texas Medical Association) tried to put Teladoc out of business and might have succeeded had the company not spent six years in a protracted court battle.

Telemedicine doesn't just lower costs. It has the potential to save lives.

Suppose you are a patient in an intensive care ward in southern Minnesota or parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. There is a chance that your vital signs are not being monitored by the staff of the hospital where you are. Instead, they could be monitored by the clinical staff of the Mayo Clinic, miles away. The Mayo Clinic's eICU (electronic intensive care unit) currently oversees 73 beds in remote locations.

Mayo provides expertise that is not available in local community hospitals. How a stroke is treated and how quickly it is treated have an enormous impact on patient recovery. With telemedicine, patients get access to the best that Mayo has to offer.

So who could be against this? The American Medical Association for one. The federal government for another. The official position of the AMA is that doctors must be physically present to deliver appropriate care. For the most part, Medicare payment policies follow AMA guidelines.

Technology is on its way, whether organized medicine likes it or not. Patients in 14 states can now download an app made by a Silicon Valley firm called Lemonaid Health. Customers fill out a questionnaire on eight simple health concerns, including sinusitis, birth control and acid reflux. These are reviewed by a doctor who can write a prescription — all for a fee of $15.

Health Tap, another startup company, offers an artificial intelligence product that allows patients to submit their symptoms and then get options on what to do next. Like an Uber for healthcare, the company connects patients to 107,000 doctors who are willing to answer general health questions.

A third California company makes a $200 iPhone attachment that operates like an otoscope. Parents can use it to look inside their child's ear, take a photo, send it to a doctor-on-demand and, for $49, get a diagnosis — potentially saving an expensive trip to the emergency room.
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A brand-new world awaits us. Patients are ahead of most doctors in getting there.

The Thermia online health educational tool, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, has enabled one-month-faster prediction of seasonal influenza outbreaks in China, via its digital integration with a commercially-available wearable thermometer. The findings appear in a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. 

“The fact that we were able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than China’s national surveillance programs really shows the capacity for everyday, wearable digital health devices to track the spread of disease at the population level,” says the study’s lead author Yulin Hswen, who is a research fellow in Boston Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Although the Boston Children’s team has previously demonstrated that social media can be used to track disease, this is the first time they’ve shown that outbreaks can be predicted through an integrated wearable device and online tool.

“Collectively, we are still coming to terms with the data deluge from wearable devices, but it is imperative that we begin to generate value from this data,” says the study’s senior author Jared Hawkins, PhD, who is the director of informatics at Boston Children’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA). “From a public health perspective — as we have shown with this latest study — there is enormous potential for tapping this data for research, surveillance and influencing policy.”

Thermia, a fever educational tool created by the Boston Children’s team, works as a standalone digital application or can receive a child’s temperature reading directly through the iThermonitor, an FDA-approved, patch-like thermometer that is worn under the arm. This integration is possible under a license agreement between Boston Children’s and the iThermonitor’s manufacturer, Raiing Medical Inc., which is based in China. Although the wearable is available around the world, consumers in China have been the earliest adopters of the device.

In China, the Thermia-empowered iThermonitor has quickly gained popularity among digitally-savvy parents who have purchased the wearable device to monitor their child’s temperature. When iThermonitor detects a fever, parents can access Thermia via web or mobile and answer online questions about the child’s current symptoms and medical history.

Data collected from these interactions is anonymized and analyzed by the Boston Children’s team to track disease at the population level. Using this method, the team collected nearly 45,000 data points from China’s Thermia users between 2014 and 2016. They discovered that outbreaks of “influenza-like illnesses”, which had the hallmark signs of influenza, could be detected digitally in real time.

In comparison to the influenza surveillance data collected by the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) of the People’s Republic of China, the data from iThermonitor and Thermia identified emerging outbreaks of the flu an entire month earlier.

In contrast, China has 620 million mobile internet users who can theoretically access the standalone Thermia application from any computer, smartphone or even the Amazon Alexa assistant.

“In geographically large and densely populated countries like China, tools like Thermia can provide better on-the-ground disease surveillance than by relying on data that is only captured at the point of treatment in the clinic,” says Hswen.
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You can access Thermia to learn about your child’s symptoms and contribute to Boston Children’s anonymized disease database.

Presbyopia, or farsightedness caused by the loss of elasticity in your eyes as you age, affects 83% of adults over the age of 45 in North America, and nearly everyone is forced to wear glasses by the time they hit 50. Combined with an increasing concern for the long-term effects of staring at a screen all day, and the future starts to look blurry. But studies show that smartphone apps might retrain your brain to improve your sight.
The New York Times spent some time with GlassesOff, the only app backed by medical studies that claim to improve eyesight. Austin Frakt, the writer of the Times report, used the app for a month. The app told him his ability to read text improved by about 33% by the time testing was finished.

GlassesOff uses perceptual learning to improve your vision by training your eyes to view specific images. It deploys “Gober” patches, or black, white, and, gray images to stimulate the brain so it can learn and recognize patterns. After firing up the app, users will see an extremely low contrast image with circles in the background. A pattern then flashes on the screen for a matter of milliseconds, and a second pattern flashes soon after. Users must then decide which image appeared more focused.

That may sound like those fun tests your eye doctor gives you during a routine checkup, but this is a lot more punishing. To be effective, users must use the app hundreds of times on a daily basis, and as Frakt points out, “Weeks into it, I began to dread the monotonous labor.”

The science behind the application isn’t much different than practicing how to hit a baseball in a batting cage. The ball shoots out of the machine, your eyes catch a glimpse of white, and your brain reacts accordingly. The more you do it, the slower that ball appears, and the better equipped you are to try a faster speed.

That brings us to the surprising science behind this app—it doesn’t help your eyes, it trains your brain.  Your eyes pick up data of an image and send it to your brain where it unscrambles into recognizable objects. Our brains only have around 250 milliseconds to process words read at a normal speed. If the brain is unable to recognize a word in that time, it won’t be able to understand it. By flashing difficult-to-see images, you can speed up the time it takes for your brain to process that data and improve different parts of your vision. Some studies agree that the technique can “significantly improve visual performance for older adults.”

Others are not as hopeful.

“Human vision quality is determined by the physical eye and the way the brain reads the information that the eye captures,” ophthalmologist Michelle Rhee told CBS News. “To think that we can reverse presbyopia or reverse having to wear glasses for myopia and any of those different prescriptions solely on neuroplasticity is just not accurate.”

Frakt says his vision is equivalent to someone ten years younger than him after testing GlassesOff for just a few months.
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But that alleged benefit doesn’t come cheap. The app costs $25 for three months, which is enough time to get through the main program. It costs $60 a year for “maintenance training” after that. But those charges pay for themselves in convenience and price if they can keep you from needing reading glasses sometime down the road.

When people speak of IBM Watson, they do so in hushed tones in the corner of rooms, whispering for fear it will jinx it and the promise will not be realized. ‘Did you hear? Watson will cure cancer.’ Watson is, in many ways, the Chuck Norris of cognitive computing. 

Watson’s reputation stems, in no small part, from IBM itself, who are not modest when it comes to blowing their own horn. Dr. John Kelly, who heads up the Watson team at IBM, has claimed that ‘This is brand new technology. It’s going to change the world.’ Not to be outdone, Ann Rubin, IBM's VP of branded content and global creative, said that Watson enables users to ‘outthink cancer, outthink risk, outthink doubt, outthink competitors.’ Big promises. But is this hype warranted, or, as some believe, is the emperor running amok completely naked? 

IBM established itself as a leader in the artificial intelligence field back in 1996 when its Deep Blue chess playing computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Then Watson’s Jeopardy victory in 2011 cemented its reputation. Shortly after the Jeopardy victory in 2014, IBM broke down Watson’s capabilities into 40 different components each serving a particular business problem, which is the business model it still uses today. 

IBM pitches Watson as a solution for a variety of industries, from healthcare to financial services. It crunches through vast amounts of data to understand problems and environments in the same way humans do, a process known as cognitive computing. It then uses these insights to provide predictions and make decisions. According to IBM, the business is growing. It is at the center of the company's ‘strategic imperatives’ - which include cloud, mobile and analytics - that contributed $32.8 billion in revenue in 2016. However, further details around the return on investment are scant, as it is lumped in with the other technologies in the company’s financial statements. In February last year, chief executive Ginni Rometty explained that it does not provide much information because Watson is new and growing, telling the annual IBM analyst meeting, ’We are building an era, a platform, an industry, and making a market with it. We have competitors who don’t disclose for a decade, [so] I’m going to protect it and nurture it — we will disclose eventually’. 

Rometty’s position is understandable, but evidence of success may at least help to counter the growing body of criticism. Among these critics is Meg Whitman, CEO of IBM competitor Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Last year she noted that ‘We're in a lot of customers where actually from a Watson perspective it's not as far along in terms of real-world applications as you might imagine from the advertising.’ This could easily be dismissed as a competitor trying to get one over on a rival, but her’s is not a lone voice. Many others are starting to argue that Watson is just a thinly veiled advertising campaign, exploiting the notoriety achieved from its Jeopardy! win to promote its consultancy services and the technologies it has put under the Watson umbrella that are not especially groundbreaking. 

Also among the dissenters is Roger Schank Ph.D., founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. He accuses Watson of false advertising, writing in an excoriating blog post that Watson is essentially just a ‘word counter’ little different from Google search. He says that it is incapable of any non-trivial reasoning, contrary to how IBM presents it in its advertising, noting specifically an ad campaign IBM ran that showed Watson’s analysis of Bob Dylan songs for key themes, which it identified as ‘love fades’ and ‘time passes’ - themes Schank argued no Dylan fan would ever put down as his most important. Although, Dylan says those themes sound ‘about right’ in the advert, so it could just be that Schank is misremembering. 
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IBM refutes accusations that it is not the high-end proposition it claims. Dr. Kelly says that ‘Everything we brand Watson analytics is very high-end AI,’ and you will find little argument that IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system is an incredible piece of technology. It’s more than capable of searching across vast repositories of unstructured digital data and returning answers remarkably quickly and has done amazing things, particularly in healthcare and refining diagnoses. The problem is not whether it's a market leader, though, it’s the promises it is making. Watson has suffered from the goals it has set for itself, from curing cancer to being the solution to cybersecurity. These are important things to resolve, and IBM needs to be honest with how much Watson can really do. Overhyping AI is dangerous, as we saw when inflated expectations and subsequent disillusionment in the 1980s led to the so-called AI Winter, bringing investment to a grinding halt and pushing research ‘underground.’ Obviously, IBM wants to sell its product, and because it is such a nascent technology it needs big targets like cancer and cybersecurity to put itself on the map and gain customer support. However, in the long term, it could be shooting itself in the foot. The thaw has been hard earned, and although another setback of the same magnitude is unlikely for AI, expectations should still be managed.

Three years ago, Menash Michael stepped out of his Tel Aviv home to walk his dog. By the time he reached his driveway, he was lying unconscious on the ground. He’d fainted. Fortunately, his tumble was spotted by a next-door neighbor who called for an ambulance, and he was rushed to the nearest hospital.

Menash is a type 1 diabetic, meaning his pancreas doesn’t work properly and is unable to produce the insulin required to turn glucose into energy. He was diagnosed with the chronic condition almost 30 years ago, and since then has had to inject himself with artificial insulin four times a day. Every day.

It’s important that Menash gets the timing and doses of these injections precisely right. If he makes a mistake, the consequences could be fatal.

When your blood sugar level hits 50, you become confused. If it drops to 30, you faint and need an emergency glucose injection.

When he tumbled to the ground three years ago, his blood sugar level was just 23. “I was almost dead,” he said.

It turned out that Menash had accidentally given himself double the normal dose of insulin. This is a very easy mistake to make, albeit one with potentially serious consequences.

But although unpleasant, this episode got Menash thinking how he could irradicate the problem for others. Enter Insulog.

This device clips onto the end of any standard disposable insulin injection pen and automatically records whenever the user adjusts their insulin dose or injects themselves. This is then displayed prominently on the device’s LCD display, making it harder for someone to inadvertently double-dose themselves.
“The insulog has a multi-sensor system. When you turn the dial of the insulin pen or press the injection button, the sensors detect how many units you’re taking, and records it on the display,” Michael said. 
The device comes with a built-in battery, which lasts up to six days and can be recharged via MicroUSB. It also boasts Bluetooth connectivity allowing users to automatically synchronize their injection data with their iOS or Android smartphone, which can be later shared with their physician to help them manage their diabetes.
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The Insulog is being launched on IndieGoGo and backers can get their hands on a kit for as little as $109 with delivery promised in July, 2017.

The 2016 Rio Olympics are how history and there was no shortage of tech at this year's event. Athletes used all kinds of gadgets to help them train and stay fit, from heads-up displays used by cyclists to jump trackers worn by the volleyball team. Here are a few of the gadgets that made it to Rio.
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Smart Cycling Glasses

You may have seen U.S. cyclists wearing Solos smart glasses, a kind of Google Glass for athletes. The glasses have a tiny heads-up display that shows metrics like heart rate, pace, distance, and cadence. The data appears in real-time, so cyclists know if they are moving at their projected pace. The glasses have built-in headphones and can run for around six hours before needing a charge. The Solos glasses are expected to become available next Spring and should cost around $500.

Joint and Muscle Therapy

Athletes with the U.S. gymnastics team used LumiWave's Infrared Light Therapy device to treat minor muscle and joint pain. Each of its eight "pods" beams infrared light into body tissue, which helps increase blood flow and provide short-term pain relief. The device has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "for temporary relief of minor muscle pain and spasms and minor joint pain and stiffness." While gymnasts have access to it now, the device is on pre-order to the general public starting at $449.




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Jump Tracker

Wearables provide analytics data to help athletes train. The U.S. women's volleyball team used the Vert Wearable Jump Monitor, which clips onto clothing to track how high, how far and how often each player jumps. The data is sent to an app to help coaches ensure athletes don't over-exert themselves, which can lead to injury. It can also be used for basketball and other sports. You can buy your own for $125.

 


Visa's Payment Ring

​Crime was a big concern at the Rio Olympics. Visa provided a wearable payments ring to its sponsored athletes at the games, allowing them to make cashless payments. Tap the ring on a compatible payment terminal and you're done. Visa is also linking pre-paid cards to payment bands and smartwatches like the Swatch Bellamy.

Researchers at the Tufts University have developed a prototype called smart stitches that can close wounds and also send data to doctors indicating health status of tissue during the healing process. The prototype is described in a paper published in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

The sutures are made from a variety of different materials including cotton and synthetics and are dipped in physical and chemical sensing compounds that connect to a wireless electronic circuit. These unique nanosensors create a flexible platform that has currently been successfully sutured into tissue in rats as well as in vitro.

When in operation, the tiny sensors transmit several pieces of biometric data including the temperature around the wound, its pH balance and glucose levels to name but a few. It can also track how well the stitches are holding and whether there is too much pressure or strain on the wound. 

“The ability to suture a thread-based diagnostic device intimately in a tissue or organ environment in three dimensions adds a unique feature that is not available with other flexible diagnostic platforms,” said Sameer Sonkusale, Ph.D., Director of the interdisciplinary Nano Lab at Tufts. 

“We think thread-based devices could potentially be used as smart sutures for surgical implants, smart bandages to monitor wound healing, or integrated with textile or fabric as personalized health monitors and point-of-care diagnostics,” he said. 
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The smart sutures are still in the research stage, but the promising data collected so far indicates a positive future for biometric tracking in humans.