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Category: biotech/medical – Page 994

Machine learning model finds genetic factors for heart disease

To get an inside look at the heart, cardiologists often use electrocardiograms (ECGs) to trace its electrical activity and magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to map its structure. Because the two types of data reveal different details about the heart, physicians typically study them separately to diagnose heart conditions.

Now, in a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists in the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a that can learn patterns from ECGs and MRIs simultaneously, and based on those patterns, predict characteristics of a patient’s . Such a tool, with further development, could one day help doctors better detect and diagnose heart conditions from routine tests such as ECGs.

The researchers also showed that they could analyze ECG recordings, which are easy and cheap to acquire, and generate MRI movies of the same heart, which are much more expensive to capture. And their method could even be used to find new genetic markers of heart disease that existing approaches that look at individual data modalities might miss.

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AI chatbot outperforms human doctors in responding to patient questions

An artificial intelligence chatbot was able to outperform human doctors in responding to patient questions posted online, according to evaluators in a new study.

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine found that a chatbot’s responses to patient questions, pulled from a social media platform, were rated “significantly higher for both quality and empathy.”

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Researchers uncover new clues to origins of the most common pediatric kidney cancer

While Wilms tumor—also known as nephroblastoma—is rare, it is the most prevalent childhood kidney cancer. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles have now pinpointed a disruption in early kidney progenitor cell development that can be linked to the formation of Wilms tumor.

In a study published in Advanced Science, researchers at the GOFARR Laboratory in Urology compared kidney progenitor cells from a with from a healthy kidney. Normally, these precursor cells mature into kidney cells, but when their early development is dysregulated, they behave like .

While most children with Wilms tumor are successfully treated, current therapies are aggressive. A minority of these patients have unfavorable prognoses or relapses; for these children, there is no existing therapy. “By achieving a more precise understanding of how Wilms tumors develop, our goal is to find new treatments for all types of Wilms tumor,” says Laura Perin, Ph.D., Co-Director of the GOFARR laboratory and senior study co-author with Stefano Da Sacco, Ph.D., another researcher at the GOFARR Laboratory.

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2023 MIT Club of Boston BioSummit

It was an honor to speak at MIT’s Broad Institute about some of my past and present synthetic biology research on redesigning bacteria and viruses to act as delivery systems for biomedicine! Video recording is now available! Here is a link which should take you to 1:40:18 when my talk starts:[ ]. My talk was part of the inaugural MIT Biosummit (https://mitbiosummit.com/), a forward-looking conference which this year focused on tackling challenges at the interface of climate change and health sciences. #futureofmedicine #future #biotech #mit Thank you Ryan Robinson for helping to organize this conference and for giving your own excellent talk!

Recording of the MIT Club of Boston 2023 BioSummit: Human Health 2050 held at the Broad Institute on April 27, 2023. Note: Although the video is almost 6 hours long, you can rapidly navigate and skip to a particular speaker or session by scrubbing along the video timeline (in Chrome or Edge) or using the time markers listed below in blue (in all browsers). You can also use chapter browsing in the YouTube app on platforms where it is available.

Mitbiosummit.com.

0:00:00 Introductory remarks: Ryan Robinson, Whitney Espich.
0:08:44 Morning keynote: Bradley Willcox.
0:57:14 Infectious disease panel introduction, Lindsey Baden.
1:02:21 Kieren Marr.
1:38:27 Speaker transition with Lindsey Baden.
1:39:36 Logan Collins.
1:56:36 Ryan Robinson.
2:13:13 Infectious disease panel Q&A
2:24:00 Longevity panel introduction, Eduardo Cornejo.
2:27:14 Joseph Coughlin.
2:46:47 Vladim Gladyshev.
3:02:28 Cavin Ward-Caviness.
3:18:55 Longevity panel Q&A
3:37:44 Food supply panel introduction, Viji Thomas.
3:48:32 Gary Cohen.
4:05:16 Greg Sixt.
4:21:50 Anirban Kundu.
4:37:32 Food supply panel Q&A
5:15:03 Sebastian Eastham.
5:42:13 Closing remarks, preview of next year’s BioSummit Stephanie Licata.

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Scientists develop A.I. system focused on turning peoples’ thoughts into text

Scientists have developed a noninvasive AI system focused on translating a person’s brain activity into a stream of text, according to a peer-reviewed study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The system, called a semantic decoder, could ultimately benefit patients who have lost their ability to physically communicate after suffering from a stroke, paralysis or other degenerative diseases.

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“This DNA Is Not Real”: Why Scientists Are Deepfaking the Human Genome

Researchers have taught an AI to make artificial genomes — possibly overcoming the problem of how to protect people’s genetic information while also amassing enough DNA for research.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) pit two neural networks against each other to produce new, synthetic data that is so good it can pass for real data. Examples have been popping up all over the web — generating pictures and videos (a la “this city does not exist”). AIs can even generate convincing news articles, food blogs, or human faces (take a look here for a complete list of all the oddities created by GANs).

Now, researchers from Estonia are going more in-depth with deepfakes of human DNA. They created an algorithm that repeatedly generates the genetic code of people that don’t exist.

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Multiple People Killed, At Least 30 Injured in Large Crashes on I-55 in Illinois During Dust Storm

Multiple people were killed and more than 30 others injured in large crashes involving up to 90 vehicles on Interstate 55 in south-central Illinois during a dust storm, authorities said Monday afternoon.

According to Illinois State Police, multiple fatalities were reported with the crashes, but an exact number remained unclear. At least 30 others, ranging in age from 2 to 80 years old, were taken to area hospitals. Their conditions weren’t immediately known.

Authorities said they were still conducting additional searches through the vehicles involved, which included an estimated 30 commercial vehicles and 40 to 60 passenger cars. The biggest challenge, according to Illinois State Police Major Ryan Starric, the biggest challenge was trying to get to victims quickly.

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Scientific Papers

This Special Issue, ‘Scientific Papers by Developmental Biologists in Japan’, represents a collection of high-quality review articles, research articles, and communications on the development of multicellular organisms at the molecule, cell, tissue, organ, and whole-organism level, which were written and submitted by developmental biologists working in Japan.

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Intradialytic exercise may improve survival rates in adult patients receiving hemodialysis

Patients with kidney failure have a high mortality rate. There is an exponential increase in the number of patients experiencing kidney failure requiring treatment with life-saving kidney replacement therapy (KRT), including hemodialysis (HD), peritoneal dialysis (PD) or kidney transplantation.

Researchers have found inj a new study that Intradialytic exercise may improve survival rates in adult patients receiving hemodialysis.

The new study has been published in the BMC Nephrology.

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