For thousands of years, micro-organisms have been used to facilitate chemical reactions - in beer brewing, for example. However, biochemical processes are incredibly complex, with a multitude of reactions taking place simultaneously and influencing one another. There are countless parameters that play a role, not all of which can be directly measured.
Read more ...
Imitation is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery, Unless You Are an App Developer
For every two mobile apps released, one is a clone of an existing app. However, new research published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research shows the success of the original app is not always adversely affected by the creation of clone apps. In fact, the study, which was conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, found that whether the copycat app increases or decreases the number of downloads of the original is dependent upon the quality of the copy.
Read more ...
Smartphone 'Scores' can Help Doctors Track Severity of Parkinson's Disease Symptoms
Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder, is often tough to treat effectively because symptoms, such as tremors and walking difficulties, can vary dramatically over a period of days, or even hours. To address this challenge, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists, working with an interdisciplinary team of experts from two other institutions, have developed a new approach that uses sensors on a smartphone to generate a score that reliably reflects symptom severity in patients with Parkinson's disease.
Read more ...
New Camera Gives Surgeons a Butterfly's Eye View of Cancer
Cancer lurking in tissue could be more easily found when looking through a butterfly's eye. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a surgical camera inspired by the eye of the morpho butterfly. The tiny camera, connected to the goggles a surgeon wears, sees infrared signals given off by tumor-binding dyes so that the surgeon can find and remove all of the cancerous tissue.
Read more ...
Smartphone App Performs Better than Traditional Exam in Cardiac Assessment
A smartphone application using the phone's camera function performed better than traditional physical examination to assess blood flow in a wrist artery for patients undergoing coronary angiography, according to a randomized trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
Read more ...
Portable Device Detects Severe Stroke in Seconds with 92 Percent Accuracy
A new device worn like a visor can detect emergent large-vessel occlusion in patients with suspected stroke with 92 percent accuracy, report clinical investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), Mount Sinai, the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and elsewhere in an article published online on March 6, 2018, in the Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery. Patients with large-vessel occlusions can then be routed to a Comprehensive Stroke Center with endovascular capabilities.
Read more ...
Is Your Smile Male or Female?
The dynamics of how men and women smile differs measurably, according to new research, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically assign gender purely based on a smile. Although automatic gender recognition is already available, existing methods use static images and compare fixed facial features.
Read more ...