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In a study of more than 2,000 chest X-rays, radiologists outperformed AI in accurately identifying the presence and absence of three common lung diseases, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

“Chest radiography is a common diagnostic tool, but significant training and experience is required to interpret exams correctly,” said lead researcher Louis L. Plesner, M.D., resident radiologist and Ph.D. fellow in the Department of Radiology at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While commercially available and FDA-approved AI tools are available to assist radiologists, Dr. Plesner said the clinical use of deep-learning-based AI tools for radiological diagnosis is in its infancy.

The thymus, a small and relatively unknown organ, may play a bigger role in the immune system of adults than was previously believed. With age, the glandular tissue in the thymus is replaced by fat, but, according to a new study from Linköping University, the rate at which this happens is linked to sex, age and lifestyle factors. These findings also indicate that the appearance of the thymus reflects the aging of the immune system.

“We doctors can assess the appearance of the thymus from largely all chest CT scans, but we tend to not see this as very important. But now it turns out that the appearance of the thymus can actually provide a lot of valuable information that we could benefit from and learn more about,” says Mårten Sandstedt, MD, Ph.D., at the Department of Radiology in Linköping and Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Linköping University.

The thymus is a gland located in the upper part of the chest. It has been long known that this small organ is important for immune defense development in children. After puberty, the thymus decreases in size and is eventually replaced by fat, in a process known as fatty degeneration. This has been taken to mean that it loses its function, which is why the thymus has for a long time been considered as being not important in adult life.

Machine learning is essential to designing the polymers, Murthy emphasizes, because they must be tailored to the specific gene therapy.

“There’s a tight interplay between the payload and in vivo mechanism of action, and the delivery vehicle needed to bring [the therapy] to that location,” he says. “You can’t have one without the other, so they have to be integrated at an early stage.”

The company hopes to use machine learning to explore the polymer design space, giving them a starting point to design a polymer. Subsequently, as the gene therapy moves from the preclinical to clinical stage, they can use artificial intelligence to tweak the polymer to make the therapy work better.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Academia Sinica of Taiwan have harnessed a combination of lab-grown cells to regenerate damaged heart muscle.

The study is published in Circulation. It addresses major challenges of using heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes, grown from stem cells, and takes a crucial step toward future clinical applications.

Previous research has shown that transplanting cardiomyocytes made from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) can replace muscle in the hearts of mammals. Researchers have struggled to bring the treatment to the clinic, in part because the implanted cells haven’t developed enough life-sustaining blood vessels to survive very long.

A UK-led team of researchers restrained mice for 6 hours to induce a stress response and then analyzed the rodents’ brains on a molecular level.⁠

This led to the discovery of increased levels of five microRNAs (miRNAs) — small molecules that help determine which genes in a cell are expressed and which aren’t — in the amygdala, the brain region implicated in anxiety. When the researchers took a closer look at the miRNA that reached the highest levels, miR-483-5p, they saw that it suppressed the expression of the Pgap2 gene — and that this suppression appeared to provide stress relief and reduce anxiety-related behavior.⁠

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Continue reading “Scientists discover ‘anxiety gene’ in the brain — and a natural way to turn it off” »

Nanotechnology sounds like a futuristic development, but we already have it in the form of CPU manufacturing. More advanced nanotech could be used to create independent mobile entities like nanobots. One of the main challenges is selecting the right chemicals, elements, and structures that actually perform a desired task. Currently, we create more chemically oriented than computationally oriented nanobots, but we still have to deal with the quantum effects at tiny scale.

One of the most important applications of nanotechnology is to create nanomedicine, where the technology interacts with biology to help resolve problems. Of course, the nanobots have to be compatible with the body (e.g. no poisonous elements if they were broken down, etc).

Continue reading “How nanobots and nanomedicine will improve our health” »

This Review discusses how embryonic transcriptional programs, such as epithelial–mesenchymal plasticity and stemness, may be harnessed in adult tissues to drive processes and diseases such as regeneration and cancer.

Nano electron guns can help zap cancers and drive new classes of lasers.

A cholesterol-lowering drug may help reduce the risk of heart failure in people with lymphoma who receive chemotherapy drugs called anthracyclines, results from a clinical trial suggest.

Anthracyclines, such as doxorubicin, are used to treat many types of cancer. But these drugs may affect the heart’s ability to pump blood, potentially leading to heart failure.

In the trial, atorvastatin (Lipitor) was found to reduce the risk of some cardiac changes linked to heart failure among patients treated with anthracyclines.