In a STAT opinion piece, Arya Rao, a candidate in the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program, and Marc Succi write about how AI impacts clinical reasoning. “[C]linical reasoning and model reasoning are not the same thing,” Rao and Succi explain. “AI not only lacks this hidden framework and data repository for learning, but it arrives at conclusions using a fundamentally different method.”
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, emphasizes the importance of longevity planning for retirement. “For decades, preparedness meant saving enough, investing wisely, paying down debt, and entering retirement financially secure,” writes Coughlin. “Those remain essential. But longer lives are changing what it means to be prepared. Retirement planning now requires longevity planning — preparing for the long game of more years of life and all the things that life exposes us to.”
Jay Fox of the Ohio News Network joins Ohio 10 WBNS to discuss his conversation with President Sally Kornbluth about how life-changing scientific innovations in university research labs have helped build our nation’s technological prowess and ensured our strength and stability, explaining how federal research cuts threaten future medical and technological advances. “What’s at risk are the kind of cures and technological advances that we’ll enjoy as we age, as our children get older and their children’s children get older. It’s really the future that is being mortgaged at this point,” said Kornbluth during her discussion with Fox.
Popular Science reporter Laura Baisas showcases an ingestible, berry-size thermometer developed by MIT researchers that could offer continuous monitoring for sick patients. The sensor “could make it easier to determine whether a patient is sick and if they’re at risk of developing a dangerously high fever. It can also help for people tracking their fertility or those under anesthesia," writes Baisas. "The team is now working on combining the temperature sensor with different sensors that could measure other vital signs such as heart rate."
Inside Precision Medicine spotlights Prof. Giovanni Traverso and his team’s work developing an oral drug formulation containing hydrogel that allows for the delivery of small molecules and antibodies via the esophageal mucosal lining. “We were interested in delivering anti-TNFs as a model drug, but also to help people who suffer from conditions like Crohn’s disease to have options that could be delivered to the site,” says Traverso. “If we have the possibility of site-directed delivery, we may be able to mitigate systemic side effects from these immunosuppressing agents.”
In a Forbes article, contributor Wes Kilgore cites a study by MIT economists that reveals how timely hospice use can create healthcare savings in the U.S. “When families avoid hospice because of fear or legal confusion, patients return to emergency rooms, see specialists, undergo procedures, and drive-up Medicare costs,” writes Kilgore.
Moving Health, a D-Lab spinout founded by MIT students, tackles maternal mortality in rural Ghana by decreasing transport time to hospitals. CNN reporter Maya Baylis highlights how Moving Health’s tricycle ambulances were designed to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are scarce or impractical. “Sometimes the biggest barrier to surviving a medical emergency isn’t the lack of hospitals,” says Emily Young ‘18, CEO and co-founder of Moving Health, “it’s being able to get there in time.”
Nature reporter Jyoti Madhusoodanan features Prof. Regina Barzilay and Prof. James Collin’s work developing AI tools aimed at accelerating the process of drug discovery and tackling the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Barzilay notes that the goal of AI-based drug design is not to have the perfect method, but to find working solutions to the antibiotic-resistance crisis. “To me, the art is really in taking the tools we currently have, which are already doing quite a bit, and translating them into something which is useful in clinic,” she explains.
The Economist reports on the growing popularity of ingestible sensors, including work at MIT where researchers are using the devices to “sense internal conditions and act on what they find.” The MIT team “received $66m from ARPA-H, a federal grant system that pushes high-risk, transformative health-care technology, to develop ingestible devices for the oral delivery of mRNA treatments.”
Senior Research Scientist Leo Celi joins GBH News' Curiosity Desk for a panel discussion on how the information given to AI models can influence medical decision making and the future of the technology in medicine. “The people who are developing [AI] models—they have no clue about the data provenance [in health care], says Celi. “We are surveying AI health courses online that have their syllabi available and none of them are really contributing enough time for asking the students: do you know how the data came about?”
Prof. Daniel Anderson speaks with Mandy Letterii at Medscape about his development of an implantable device for people with diabetes that can dispense islet cells directly into the body to manage blood sugar, which would eliminate the need for insulin injections. “We want to allow people to forget that they have diabetes,” says Anderson. “We’re not there yet, but that’s certainly what we hope to achieve.”
New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.”
Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with WBUR’s Priyanka Dayal McCluskey about her work developing an AI risk detection tool that can analyze mammogram images and help predict risk of breast cancer before it happens or spreads. Barzilay, who describes the tool as a hi-tech weather forecast for breast health, notes that: “We really need to have tools that can help, rather than just staring at an image and trying to guess.”
Sybil, a new AI tool developed by researchers from MIT and Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, “analyzes a single CT scan and generates a risk score predicting the likelihood of developing lung cancer over a period of up to six years,” reports Ivan Rodriguez for WCVB-TV. “In 2023, researchers reported that Sybil achieved an accuracy rate of 86% to 94% in distinguishing high-risk patients from low-risk patients within a year.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Mark Herz, host of GBH Morning Edition, about the potential benefits and issues associated with using AI in medicine. “Where I really see a lot of fantastic opportunity is identifying spaces where humans don’t have a fundamental capacity, like early breast cancer detection where it’s a sub-clinical presentation,” says Ghassemi. “These are spaces where humans cannot do or have been proven not to be good at a very specific clinical task. And there, AI can really help close the gap.”