Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Peter Coy spotlights how the loss of several people close to Prof. Andrew Lo inspired him to explore how the field of finance could help advance treatments for orphan diseases. “Finance plays a huge role, sometimes way too big a role, in how drugs get developed,” says Lo. Fixing the financing model, could have a “tremendous, tremendous impact on health care.”
Writing for STAT, Prof. Emeritus Jeffrey Harris explores how community health centers “can play a crucial role in reducing the burden of the Covid-19 epidemic in the difficult winter months to come. They can serve as critical safety valves at a time when acute care hospitals and emergency rooms are saturated with patients.”
Wired reporter Will Knight spotlights how MIT researchers built a machine learning system that can help predict which patients are most likely to develop breast cancer. “What the AI tools are doing is they're extracting information that my eye and my brain can't,” says Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and division chief of breast imaging at MGH.
Prof. Giovanni Traverso has been highlighted by Wired as one of 32 innovators who are changing the world, writes Sanjana Varghese for Wired. Prof. Robert Langer notes that Traverso is “transforming how we interact with medications, for example through the development of pills that remain in the body for multiple weeks or months to address medication non-adherence, or the creation of small, swallowable devices enabling the delivery of biologics like insulin.”
Research scientist Brian Subirana speaks with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about his work developing a new AI system that could be used to help diagnose people asymptomatic Covid-19.
MIT researchers have developed a new system that uses solar power to sterilize medical tools, according to The Economist. The system “should cost just a tenth as much to make commercially as a conventional autoclave of equivalent potency.”
New Scientist reporter Donna Lu writes that MIT researchers have developed a new portable, solar-powered device that could be used to sterilize medical instruments in resource-limited areas. “The new tool works even in hazy or cloudy conditions,” writes Lu. “It consists of a solar component that heats water to generate steam, which is then connected to a pressure chamber.”
A new algorithm developed by MIT researchers could be used to help detect people with Covid-19 by listening to the sound of their coughs, reports Zoe Kleinman for BBC News. “In tests, it achieved a 98.5% success rate among people who had received an official positive coronavirus test result, rising to 100% in those who had no other symptoms,” writes Kleinman.
Mashable reporter Rachel Kraus writes that a new system developed by MIT researchers could be used to help identify patients with Covid-19. Kraus writes that the algorithm can “differentiate the forced coughs of asymptomatic people who have Covid from those of healthy people.”
A new took developed by MIT researchers uses neural networks to help identify Covid-19, reports Alyse Stanley for Gizmodo. The model “can detect the subtle changes in a person’s cough that indicate whether they’re infected, even if they don’t have any other symptoms,” Stanley explains.
TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey writes that MIT researchers have built a new AI model that can help detect Covid-19 by listening to the sound of a person’s cough. “The tool is detecting features that allow it to discriminate the subjects that have COVID from the ones that don’t,” explains Brian Subirana, a research scientist in MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory.
MIT researchers have developed a new AI model that could help identify people with asymptomatic Covid-19 based on the sound of their cough, reports CBS Boston. The researchers hope that in the future the model could be used to help create an app that serves as a “noninvasive prescreening tool to figure out who is likely to have the coronavirus.”
Biobot Analytics, an MIT startup, is testing sewage in regions across the U.S. as part of an effort to detect where the coronavirus is circulating “even before people start showing up at hospitals and clinics and before they start lining up for Covid-19 tests,” writes Maggie fox for CNN.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has awarded Prof. Regina Barzilay a $1 million prize for her work advancing the use of AI in medicine, reports John McCormick for The Wall Street Journal. "Regina is brilliant, has very high standards, and is committed to helping others,” says Prof. James Collins. “And I think her experience with—her personal experience with cancer—has motivated her to apply her intellectual talents to using AI to advance health care.”
The AP highlights how Prof. Regina Barzilay has been named the inaugural winner of a new award given by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for her work “using computer science to detect cancer and discover new drugs has won a new $1 million award for artificial intelligence.”