Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, sat down with IGN for a chat about the company, the promise of VR, and Newell’s most bleeding edge project as of late, brain-computer interfaces (BCI).
Category: biotech/medical – Page 90
Digital Frontier: Where Brain-computer Interfaces & AR/VR Could One Day Meet
Whenever I used to think about brain-computer interfaces (BCI), I typically imagined a world where the Internet was served up directly to my mind through cyborg-style neural implants—or basically how it’s portrayed in Ghost in the Shell. In that world, you can read, write, and speak to others without needing to lift a finger or open your mouth. It sounds fantastical, but the more I learn about BCI, the more I’ve come to realize that this wish list of functions is really only the tip of the iceberg. And when AR and VR converge with the consumer-ready BCI of the future, the world will be much stranger than fiction.
Be it Elon Musk’s latest company Neuralink —which is creating “minimally invasive” neural implants to suit a wide range of potential future applications, or Facebook directly funding research on decoding speech from the human brain—BCI seems to be taking an important step forward in its maturity. And while these well-funded companies can only push the technology forward for its use as a medical devices today thanks to regulatory hoops governing implants and their relative safety, eventually the technology will get to a point when it’s both safe and cheap enough to land into the brainpan’s of neurotypical consumers.
Although there’s really no telling when you or I will be able to pop into an office for an outpatient implant procedure (much like how corrective laser eye surgery is done today), we know at least that this particular future will undoubtedly come alongside significant advances in augmented and virtual reality. But before we consider where that future might lead us, let’s take a look at where things are today.
CNS-CLIP: Transforming a Neurosurgical Journal Into a… : Neurosurgery
Classical biomedical data science models are trained on a single modality and aimed at one specific task. However, the exponential increase in the size and capabilities of the foundation models inside and outside medicine shows a shift toward task-agnostic models using large-scale, often internet-based, data. Recent research into smaller foundation models trained on specific literature, such as programming textbooks, demonstrated that they can display capabilities similar to or superior to large generalist models, suggesting a potential middle ground between small task-specific and large foundation models. This study attempts to introduce a domain-specific multimodal model, Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS)-Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), developed for neurosurgical applications, leveraging data exclusively from Neurosurgery Publications.
METHODS:
We constructed a multimodal data set of articles from Neurosurgery Publications through PDF data collection and figure-caption extraction using an artificial intelligence pipeline for quality control. Our final data set included 24 021 figure-caption pairs. We then developed a fine-tuning protocol for the OpenAI CLIP model. The model was evaluated on tasks including neurosurgical information retrieval, computed tomography imaging classification, and zero-shot ImageNet classification.
Additional imaging techniques can detect early stage cancers missed by mammograms in women with dense breasts
In women with dense breasts (breasts with relatively low levels of fatty tissue) and a negative mammogram, supplemental imaging techniques detect early-stage cancers, with imaging techniques three times more effective than ultrasound, finds a Phase III randomized control trial published in The Lancet.
Women with extremely dense breasts, about 10% of those aged 50–70 years in the UK, face a fourfold increased risk of breast cancer compared to those with the least dense breasts.
Mammograms are less effective for detecting early-stage cancer in dense breasts, as the tissue can hide tumors on the breast X-rays. Previous studies have shown MRI and ultrasound are effective supplementary imaging methods, but this study is the first to compare them with contrast mammography in women with normal mammograms and dense breast tissue.
A rule-breaking, colorful silicone that can conduct electricity
A newly discovered silicone variant is a semiconductor, University of Michigan researchers have discovered—upending assumptions that the material class is exclusively insulating.
“The material opens up the opportunity for new types of flat-panel displays, flexible photovoltaics, wearable sensors or even clothing that can display different patterns or images,” said Richard Laine, U-M professor of materials science and engineering and macromolecular science and engineering and corresponding author of the study recently published in Macromolecular Rapid Communications.
Silicone oils and rubbers—polysiloxanes and silsesquioxanes—are traditionally insulating materials, meaning they resist the flow of electricity or heat. Their water-resistant properties make them useful in biomedical devices, sealants, electronic coatings and more.
‘Selfish’ genes called introners proven to be a major source of genetic complexity
DNA is the genetic code that provides the biological instructions for every living species, but not every bit of DNA helps the species survive. Some pieces of DNA are more like parasites, along for the ride and their own survival.
To translate DNA into proteins, the building blocks of life, many of these selfish DNA elements have to be removed from the genetic code. Doing so enables the body to produce the wide diversity of proteins that allow for complex life, but the process can also lead to health problems, like some kinds of cancer.
University of California, Santa Cruz researchers are studying the ways that these genetic elements hide and make copies of themselves, so they can propagate within a species’ DNA, or even hop from one species to an unrelated one in a process called horizontal gene transfer.