In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine is shrunken down and injected into a scientist's body to repair a blood clot in his brain. While the movie may be still be fiction, researchers at Caltech are making strides in this direction: they have, for the first time, created bacterial cells with the ability to reflect sound waves, reminiscent of how submarines reflect sonar to reveal their locations.
Ophthalmologists' use of electronic health records (EHR) systems for storing and accessing patients' medical histories more than doubled between 2006 and 2016, while their perceptions of financial and clinical productivity following EHR implementation declined, a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology shows.
Robotic research benefited in the last ten years of a standardized common open-source platform for research on embodied artificial intelligence (AI): the humanoid robot iCub. Born in Italy, today it is available in 36 copies in laboratories across Europe, USA, South Korea, Singapore and Japan and more than hundred researchers worldwide contribute to develop its skills.
Some 50,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson's disease (PD) every year. The American Institute of Neurology estimates there are one million people affected with this neurodegenerative disorder, with 60 years as average age of onset. Falls and fall-related injuries are a major issue for people with Parkinson's - up to 70 percent of advanced PD patients fall at least once a year and two-thirds suffer recurring falls.
In the largest study of its kind, researchers from the University of Bristol have analysed mood indicators in text from 800 million anonymous messages posted on Twitter. These tweets were found to reflect strong patterns of positive and negative moods over the 24-hour day.
Circadian rhythms, widely referred to as the 'body clock', allows people's bodies to predict their needs over the dark and light periods of the day.
Playing an adventure video game featuring a fictitious, young emergency physician treating severe trauma patients was better than text-based learning at priming real doctors to quickly recognize the patients who needed higher levels of care, according to a new trial led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The results, published by The BMJ, held even though doctors assigned to the game enjoyed it less than those assigned to traditional, text-based education.
A team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota has 3D printed lifelike artificial organ models that mimic the exact anatomical structure, mechanical properties, and look and feel of real organs. These patient-specific organ models, which include integrated soft sensors, can be used for practice surgeries to improve surgical outcomes in thousands of patients worldwide.