With apps and activity trackers measuring every step people take, every morsel they eat, and each symptom or pain, patients commonly arrive at doctor's offices armed with minutely detailed data they've been collecting about themselves. Yet health care providers lack the capacity or tools to review five years of Fitbit logs or instantaneously interpret data from dozens of lifestyle, fitness or food tracking apps that a patient might have on a cell phone, according to new research.
University of Melbourne doctors and engineers are using supercomputers to create 3D models from patients with heart disease, with photos from a camera thinner than a human hair. The images, gathered during a routine angiogram, are fed into a supercomputer.
When remote regions with limited health facilities experience an epidemic, they need portable diagnostic equipment that functions outside the hospital. As demand for such equipment grows, EPFL researchers have developed a low-cost and portable microfluidic diagnostic device. It has been tested on Ebola and can be used to detect many other diseases.
A research team from the University of Liverpool has reached an important milestone towards creating a urine diagnostic test for prostate cancer that could mean that invasive diagnostic procedures that men currently undergo eventually become a thing of the past.
Imagined ugliness, or body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) as it is known, can be treated with internet-based CBT, according to a recent randomised study, the first of its kind ever conducted. The new treatment, which is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), has been developed by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet and has the potential to increase access to care for sufferers of BDD.
Scientists at the Universities of York and Torino have used mathematics as a tool to provide precise details of the structure of protein nanoparticles, potentially making them more useful in vaccine design. Working with a world-leading group at the University of Connecticut in the USA, who pioneered the development of self-assembling protein nanoparticles (SAPNs) for vaccine design, they have used advanced mathematical calculations to create a complete picture of the surface morphology of these particles.
A pilot study finds that using smartphone reminders to prompt people to get moving may help reduce sedentary behavior. The study was supported by the American Cancer Society, with technical expertise provided by the e-Health Technology Program at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. The study appears in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.