Summary: Text-to-image generation deep learning models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can be a promising new tool for image augmentation, generation, and manipulation in a healthcare setting.
Source: JMIR Publications
A new paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research describes how generative models such as DALL-E 2, a novel deep learning model for text-to-image generation, could represent a promising future tool for image generation, augmentation, and manipulation in health care.
Posted in biotech/medical, computing, genetics, health
A study of the electron excitation response of DNA to proton radiation has elucidated mechanisms of damage incurred during proton radiotherapy.
Radiobiology studies on the effects of ionizing radiation on human health focus on the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule as the primary target for deleterious outcomes. The interaction of ionizing radiation with tissue and organs can lead to localized energy deposition large enough to instigate double strand breaks in DNA, which can lead to mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and changes in gene expression. Understanding the mechanisms behind these interactions is critical for developing radiation therapies and improving radiation protection strategies. Christopher Shepard of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his colleagues now use powerful computer simulations to show exactly what part of the DNA molecule receives damaging levels of energy when exposed to charged-particle radiation (Fig. 1) [1]. Their findings could eventually help to minimize the long-term radiation effects from cancer treatments and human spaceflight.
The interaction of radiation with DNA’s electronic structure is a complex process [2, 3]. The numerical models currently used in radiobiology and clinical radiotherapy do not capture the detailed dynamics of these interactions at the atomic level. Rather, these models use geometric cross-sections to predict whether a particle of radiation, such as a photon or an ion, crossing the cell volume will transfer sufficient energy to cause a break in one or both of the DNA strands [4– 6]. The models do not describe the atomic-level interactions but simply provide the probability that some dose of radiation will cause a population of cells to lose their ability to reproduce.
Posted in health, neuroscience
Contribution of exercise to brain resilience.
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A new University of Illinois project is using advanced object recognition technology to keep toxin-contaminated wheat kernels out of the food supply and to help researchers make wheat more resistant to fusarium head blight, or scab disease, the crop’s top nemesis.
“Fusarium head blight causes a lot of economic losses in wheat, and the associated toxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), can cause issues for human and animal health. The disease has been a big deterrent for people growing wheat in the Eastern U.S. because they could grow a perfectly nice crop, and then take it to the elevator only to have it get docked or rejected. That’s been painful for people. So it’s a big priority to try to increase resistance and reduce DON risk as much as possible,” says Jessica Rutkoski, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois. Rutkoski is a co-author on the new paper in the Plant Phenome Journal.
Increasing resistance to any crop disease traditionally means growing a lot of genotypes of the crop, infecting them with the disease, and looking for symptoms. The process, known in plant breeding as phenotyping, is successful when it identifies resistant genotypes that don’t develop symptoms, or less severe symptoms. When that happens, researchers try to identify the genes related to disease resistance and then put those genes in high-performing hybrids of the crop.
Google announced a new open source program called Open Health Stack for developers to build health-related apps. These tools, unveiled at the company’s “The Check Up” special event this week, include a Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Android and design guidelines for health apps.
The search giant said that the stack is centered around the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Standards (FHIR) standards. This makes it easier for developers to capture the information and healthcare workers to access that. FHIR has been adopted by a lot of major electronic health record (EHR) providers.
The Open Health Stack gives developers access to Android FHIR SDK to build secure apps that can also work offline; a design guide to help developers make data capture easy; and FHIR Analytics to derive insights complex structure of the framework and FHIR Info Gateway to assign role-based access of data to various stakeholders. The last two components are available under early access, and Google is developing more features within both.
One Health Approaches To Prevent Zoonoses & Antimicrobial Resistance — Dr. Keith Sumption, Ph.D. — Chief Veterinary Officer and Leader of the Animal Health Program; Director, Joint Centre for Zoonoses and Anti-Microbial Resistance (CJWZ), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Dr. Keith Sumption, Ph.D. is Chief Veterinary Officer and Leader of the Animal Health Program at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO — https://www.fao.org/home/en) as well as their Director of the Joint Centre for Zoonoses and Anti-Microbial Resistance (CJWZ).
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is an international organization that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security. The FAO comprises 195 members and helps governments and development agencies coordinate their activities to improve and develop agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and land and water resources. It also conducts research, provides technical assistance to projects, operates educational and training programs, and collects agricultural output, production, and development data.
Dr. Sumption has worked on disease ecology at the interaction of wildlife, domestic and the environment for more than 30 years.
Dr. Sumption holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the University of Reading, gained following 3 years of field and molecular epidemiology research upon African Swine Fever in southern Africa, and veterinary medicine (Vet. MB) and Natural Sciences degrees from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Driving Toward the Elimination of Cancer — Joel Greshock — VP, Oncology, Data Science & Digital Health, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.
Joel Greshock is VP, Oncology, Data Science & Digital Health, Janssen Research & Development (https://www.janssen.com/oncology/leadership-team). In this position, he is responsible for creating unique and actionable medical insights using large and increasingly available datasets. The focus of this research includes discovering novel therapeutic targets, identifying areas of unmet medical need, and enhancing clinical trial recruitment and execution.
Prior to joining Janssen R&D, Joel served as Vice President of Bioinformatics at Neon Therapeutics, Inc., where he built and managed the Data Sciences organization. At Neon, he was responsible for the design and deployment of personalized cancer therapies now under clinical evaluation.
Prior to joining Neon, Joel served as Head of Oncology Translational Informatics for Novartis, where he was responsible for the correlation of patient outcomes with molecular biomarkers, identification of mechanisms of clinical resistance and computational research for assets approaching or being evaluated in early phases of development.
Before joining Novartis, Joel assumed numerous roles for GlaxoSmithKline Oncology, which included Head of Bioinformatics. Earlier in his career, Joel was a Data Analyst at Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, where he built early generation microarray platforms and developed widely used predictive models for cancer predisposition mutations.
Reliable carbon-free power for the world — michelle catts, senior vice president, nuclear programs, ge-hitachi nuclear energy.
Michelle Catts is the Senior Vice President of Nuclear Programs at GE-Hitachi (GEH — https://nuclear.gepower.com/) located in Wilmington, NC.
Ms. Catts has over 18 years of demonstrated managerial and technical expertise in nuclear Regulatory Affairs and currently is responsible for ensuring world-class Quality, Continuous Improvement, Regulatory Affairs, and oversight of Environment, Health & Safety programs. She manages a multimillion-dollar budget and over a 30-member organization. She provides licensing and quality leadership and guidance to support nuclear fuel facility licensing, current nuclear fleet fuel reload/outage licensing activities, new reactor and new fuel opportunities, Technical Regulations and Standards, and GE-Hitachis’s Vallecitos and Morris sites.
Prior to joining GE-Hitachi, Ms. Catts worked for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) where she held positions of increasing responsibility including as a nuclear reactor inspector stationed onsite at nuclear power plants up to the Policy Advisor to the Presidential Appointed NRC Chairman.
Ms. Catts holds a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University and is currently working on her MBA at UNCW.
The machines could help to “drastically increase the efficiency of the farming industry.”
In farming, weeds can strangle crops and destroy yields. Unfortunately, spraying herbicides to deal with the intrusive plants pollutes the environment and harms human health and there simply aren’t enough workers to tackle all the weeds by hand.
A new startup called FarmWise has come up with a solution: autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds while leaving crops untouched, according to an MIT report published on Thursday.
A new paper in Nature Communications illuminates how a previously poorly understood enzyme works in the cell. Many diseases are tied to chronic cellular stress, and UMBC’s Aaron T. Smith and colleagues discovered that this enzyme plays an important role in the cellular stress response. Better understanding how this enzyme functions and is controlled could lead to the discovery of new therapeutic targets for these diseases.
The enzyme is named ATE1, and it belongs to a family of enzymes called arginyl-tRNA transferases. These enzymes add arginine (an amino acid) to proteins, which often flags the proteins for destruction in the cell. Destroying proteins that are misfolded, often as a result of cellular stress, is important to prevent those proteins from wreaking havoc with cellular function. An accumulation of malfunctioning proteins can cause serious problems in the body, leading to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer, so being able to get rid of these proteins efficiently is key to long-term health.
The new paper demonstrates that ATE1 binds to clusters of iron and sulfur ions, and that the enzyme’s activity increases two-to three-fold when it is bound to one of these iron-sulfur clusters. What’s more, when the researchers blocked cells’ ability to produce the clusters, ATE1 activity decreased dramatically. They also found that ATE1 is highly sensitive to oxygen, which they believe relates to its role in moderating the cell’s stress response through a process known as oxidative stress.
