IEEE Pulse

With an aging population, the incidence and prevalence of wound problems is on the rise. Bedsores (also known as pressure ulcers or decubitus ulcers) are painful, take months to heal, and, for many patients, never do, leading to other health problems. The condition has become so acute that treating bedsores is now a significant burden on the healthcare system. An estimated 2.5 million pressure ulcers are treated in U.S. hospitals each year, adding US$11 billion annually to health care costs.

The first article of this series (see "About This Series") mentioned that, after the success of its new messaging standard for electronic health record (EHR) systems, Health Level 7 (HL7) found it difficult to develop and widely deploy a standard for the rich representation of clinical data for use in patient care. This was due, in large part, to the complexity of medicine and the resulting complexity of the clinical terminologies developed to represent it.

The idea is a compelling one: a device that looks and feels like an ordinary contact lens but that can continuously monitor a variety of health indicators. For a diabetic, such a lens might update blood glucose levels and, using a built-in flashing LED indicator light, signal when a condition needs attention. Diabetic patients might be saved from the need for repeated finger prick tests and could be monitored for longer periods of time and for a greater variety of parameters at once.

When an artery is blocked, stents are often the best way to open up the vessel. A mesh stent is tightly crimped over a tiny balloon and guided to the troubled spot; the balloon is inflated, expanding the stent, which forces the vessel open. Blood flow is restored.

Most genetic testing requires a doctor's prescription. In April 2017, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave genetics company 23andMe the go-ahead to sell DNA tests assessing the user's level of risk for ten health conditions, including Parkinson's disease and late-onset Alzheimer's disease. This was followed nearly a year later by approval to sell tests for three mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 linked to increased breast cancer risk. These remain the only FDA-approved direct-to-consumer (DTC) tests for genetic risk of disease...

According to the National Cancer Institute, 4 million people die of cancer worldwide every year-almost 500 every hour. But the most shocking thing about that statistic is this: more than a third and possibly even the vast majority of those deaths could have been prevented through sufficiently early detection. Now, a new competition aims to turn that situation around.

For Ashley Zappia (Figure 1), getting her hands dirty was part of her job. Even though she always tried to remain as clean as possible, her work as a nursing aide at a Southern California hospital required a lot of diapering, changing, and other hands-on tasks. She was mostly in the ER, where physical contact with bodily fluids from sick patients was normal. She was careful to wash her hands frequently, even though she almost always wore gowns and gloves with all patients. Every time she left or entered a room, she lathered her hands in hand-sanitizer gel...

It is hard to conceive of a better rationale for healthcare interoperability than the management of chronic disease. People in advanced, industrialized countries are living longer, and chronic disease rates among the elderly are on the rise in part because of lifestyle issues, such as obesity and inadequate exercise. As a result, the care of chronic diseases (such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease, and chronic kidney disease) accounts for well over 90% of spending by Medicare, the U...

According to the World Health Organization, every third adult suffers from hypertension-which amounts to 1 billion adults worldwide. Hypertension can lead to severe complications, such as stroke and heart failure. Each year, this illness results in 7.5 million premature deaths. The paradox of hypertension is that most people suffering from this condition are unaware of it. As such, hypertension is known as the "silent killer."

Children in developing countries often don't receive their full set of basic vaccines, which leaves them at risk for diseases that can cause serious illness and even death. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), data from 2016 show that approximately 19.5 million infants globally were not fully vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, and some 1.5 million children die from vaccine-preventable illnesses each year [1]. And when it comes to seasonal influenza vaccines, they can be difficult to prepare in advance...

One of the major challenges currently facing researchers in applying deep learning (DL) models to medical image analysis is the limited amount of annotated data. Collecting such ground-truth annotations requires domain knowledge, cost, and time, making it infeasible for large-scale databases. Albarqouni et al. [S5] presented a novel concept for learning DL models from noisy annotations collected through crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower) by introducing a robust aggregation layer to the convolutional neural networks (Figure S2)...

Recent bold, eye-catching headline predictions made by nonradiologists, e.g., "in a few years, radiology will disappear" and "stop training radiologists now," are not only far from reality but also irresponsible and a disservice to the appropriate implementation and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to health care. It is highly likely and foreseeable that AI will enhance the quality and efficiency of the current clinical practice across many specialties and even render some activities in clinical practice obsolete...

Annually, approximately 20 million men are prostate-specific-antigen screened, and 1.3 million undergo an invasive biopsy to diagnose roughly 200,000 new cases, 50% of which end up being indolent. Approximately 30,000 men die of prostate cancer (PCa) yearly. Importantly, an estimated US$8 billion is spent on unnecessary biopsies. Thus, an integrative analysis and predictive model of prognosis is needed to help identify only lethal and aggressive forms of the disease.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have influenced medicine in myriad ways, and medical imaging is at the forefront of technological transformation. Recent advances in AI/ML fields have made an impact on imaging and image analysis across the board, from microscopy to radiology. AI has been an active field of research since the 1950s; however, for most of this period, algorithms achieved subhuman performance and were not broadly adopted in medicine. Recent enhancements for computational hardware is enabling researchers to revisit old AI algorithms and experiment with new mathematical ideas...

Around 2008, endoscopists David Carr-Locke and Petros Benias began to notice an unfamiliar pattern in the bile duct during endomicroscopy, which didn't look like anything they knew from pathology. Their confusion as to what it was persisted, so they brought their observations to their colleague, pathologist Neil Theise. Eventually, a larger group of researchers worked to figure out what exactly they were seeing in the bile duct samples. Their ultimate conclusion was that the structure is part of a network of connected interstitial spaces...

At first, Ahmed El-Sohemy was puzzled by his data-they were the complete opposite of what they should have been. It was supposed to be a straightforward study of cholesterol metabolism in rats and merely replicate the protocol from another, previously published study. El-Sohemy initially assumed the discrepancy had something to do with the rat chow; but, no, he had fed the rats the very same high-cholesterol feed as in the previous study, and the blood levels of cholesterol reflected that. Had he skipped a step? Taken the wrong measurement? He leafed through his lab notes, but, again, no, he had followed the previous study precisely...

With fewer than 800,000 doctors to meet the needs of a population of 1.3 billion people, India is confronting an immense healthcare challenge. Simply put, how can more people get access to quality, affordable medical care in whatever state or territory they happen to live? This question holds relevance not just in India, but in all regions of the world where doctors are in short supply.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a popular television show called To Tell the Truth, on which three contestants claimed to be a person with an unusual occupation or distinction. Two of them were impostors, and the other was telling the truth. Four panelists asked the contestants questions to determine who was being truthful. After each panelist chose the contestant he or she thought was telling the truth, the host would ask "Will the real _____ please stand up?" To create drama, each contestant would rise at different times and then sit, leaving the contestant with the unusual occupation or distinction standing...

Mike McKenna was tired of epilepsy controlling his life. For years, he tried different medications and therapies to no avail; his seizures, which occurred every three to six days, dictated what he could do and where he could live. Then, about ten years ago, he joined a clinical trial for a new, implantable medical device from a company called NeuroPace. The RNS System monitors brain activity, detects patterns that indicate an imminent seizure, and responds by sending brief electrical pulses to disrupt the abnormal brain activity, stopping seizures in their tracks...

Although women and men share many similar health challenges throughout their lifetimes, women are not necessarily healthier. Some conditions that only women experience-such as pregnancy, ovarian cancer, or the abnormal growth of the uterus called endometriosis- can become great health risks. HIV, AIDS, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are also serious medical and social issues for women worldwide. And because a woman's reproductive system is complex and delicate-which makes it particularly vulnerable to dysfunction or disease-finding ways to treat conditions that take root in the reproductive tract often prove challenging...