Results for “medical emergency”

The staggering new estimate is based on an analysis of thousands of former players’ medical records

An experimental medical device uses a tiny amount of electricity to spark a chemical reaction and remove extra sugar from the bloodstream.

Take a selfie to see how healthy you are: the idea is enticing and this new research is promising. But so many factors have been ignored The idea that a single selfie could predict how long someone with cancer may live sounds like an incredible breakthrough. AI is getting better at spotting patterns in medical data, but can it be used to reliably predict what will happen to an individual patient? I asked a clinical colleague what she thought about the recent headlines . She found it an interesting development given that doctors have long used facial appearance to assess patient health. For example, she noted that they may write “appears stated age” or “appears older than stated age” as a proxy for general health. Now, researchers from Mass General Brigham, a healthcare institution in Massachusetts, have taken this idea a step further. They have developed an AI model trained on more than 40 million facial images – called FAHR-Face – to assess biological age and predict survival in cancer patients. For biological age, they developed FAHR-FaceAge, which estimates age from certain facial features such as the forehead, the wrinkles between the nose and mouth and the temples. For cancer survival, they developed FAHR-FaceSurvival, trained using almost 35,000 photos of cancer patients. This model focused more closely on the area below the eyes and the bridge of the nose – regions of the face “ linked with dying ”. Dr Raymond Mak , one of the study’s authors, noted that these parts of the face are the same as those referenced by Hippocrates in 400BC as signs of muscle wasting and mortality risk: “the nose sharp, the eyes sunken, the temples fallen in”. Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Continue reading...

In the three weeks since a health worker’s death in Siberia, officials have stonewalled the WHO – setting a worrying precedent for future pandemics Is there a plague outbreak in Russia? If the answer were a clear yes, there shouldn’t be much reason to worry. With swift medical intervention, plague is treatable. But in the nearly three weeks since a worker at a Siberian plague research unit died of a mysterious respiratory illness, state officials have been consistently tight-lipped about what happened and whether there were any further cases. It is this uncertainty that has the World Health Organization (WHO) and international community worried: partly because there is a – very small – risk of an outbreak, and partly because it is yet another warning that the international coordination we rely on to prevent pandemics is fraying along with the rest of international politics, and could easily fail to protect us in the future. Continue reading...