While the technology for developing artificial intelligence-powered chatbots has existed for some time, a new viewpoint piece in JAMA lays out the clinical, ethical, and legal aspects that must be considered before applying them in healthcare. And while the emergence of COVID-19 and the social distancing that accompanies it has prompted more health systems to explore and apply automated chatbots, the authors still urge caution and thoughtfulness before proceeding.

Online tools and assessments can help speed up diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the first comprehensive survey of research in the field has concluded.

The survey showed that using internet-based tools in healthcare - a field known as telehealth - has potential to improve services in autism care, when used alongside existing methods.

Many computational properties are maximized when the dynamics of a network are at a "critical point", a state where systems can quickly change their overall characteristics in fundamental ways, transitioning e.g. between order and chaos or stability and instability. Therefore, the critical state is widely assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, which are used in many AI applications.

A team of researchers led by the University of Adelaide and University of Stuttgart has used 3D micro-printing to develop the world's smallest, flexible scope for looking inside blood vessels. The camera-like imaging device can be inserted into blood vessels to provide high quality 3D images to help scientists better understand the causes of heart attack and heart disease progression, and could lead to improved treatment and prevention.

Although it might be tempting to rely on your fitness tracker to catch early signs of COVID-19, Northwestern University researchers caution that consumer wearables are not sophisticated enough to monitor the complicated illness.

Bradley Spieler, MD, Vice Chairman of Radiology Research at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, is the lead author of a Radiology Research Alliance paper examining the usefulness of social media in Radiology. It is published online as an Article in Press online in Academic Radiology.

One day, people could monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin. In a new study, University of Missouri engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor personal health.