Emergency room and urgent care clinics are typically busy and patients often have to wait many hours before they can be seen, evaluated and receive treatment. Waiting for x-rays to be interpreted by radiologists can contribute to this long wait time because radiologists often read x-rays for a large number of patients.

Computer- and smartphone-based treatments appear to be effective in reducing symptoms of depression, and while it remains unclear whether they are as effective as face-to-face psychotherapy, they offer a promising alternative to address the growing mental health needs spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

People with a serious mental illness often have dysfunctional beliefs that spiral them downward. They feel stigmatized. They may believe people are out to get them. They might think they will never get better.

Wanting to address these dysfunctional beliefs, researchers created a smartphone app with daily game-like exercises to help people with a serious mental illness reassess their beliefs.

New technology could help doctors make the most of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying patients who require intensive care unit (ICU) treatment.

The system, developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo and DarwinAI, an alumni-founded startup company, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the necessity of ICU admission based on more than 200 clinical data points, including vital signs, blood test results and medical history.

Every day, cytologists around the world use optical microscopes to analyze and classify samples of bone marrow cells thousands of times. This method to diagnose blood diseases was established more than 150 years ago, but it suffers from being very complex. Looking for rare but diagnostically important cells is both a laborious and time-consuming task.

Science has the technology to measure the activity of every gene within a single individual cell, and just one experiment can generate thousands of cells worth of data. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now revolutionised the way this data is analysed - by using 3D video gaming technology. The study is published in the journal iScience.

Transcranial focused ultrasound can be used to treat degenerative movement disorders, intractable pain, and mental disorders by delivering ultrasound energy to a specific area of the brain without opening the skull. This treatment must be performed with an image-based technology that can locate the brain lesions. Doctors typically use CT to obtain information about a patient's skull that is difficult to identify with MRI alone and to accurately focus the ultrasound on the lesions through the skull.