A Stanford report highlights the rise in machine learning research in this rapidly evolving field.
From wearable trackers to mental health chatbots to AI-based cancer screening, digital health now supports clinicians in decision making, accurate diagnosis, disease treatment, and individualized healthcare delivery. The global pandemic could help propel the field further as demand for virtual and technology-enabled services like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring shift from short-term needs to a new normal.
Now the Stanford Center for Digital Health has released a report that tracks and explores the evolution of digital health efforts at the university, analyzing both research trends and landmark studies from nearly 2,400 publications, surveys, and in-person interviews.
“We have seen an explosion in digital health — not just in productivity — but also in the number of people who have been working in this area,” says Mintu Turakhia, the center’s executive director. …
Growing up in Turkey as a Muslim with Turkish origins, I didn’t know what it felt like to be different. But, that changed when I moved to the U.S. to pursue higher education.
Here, I am a foreigner. Even after spending half of my life in this country, when I open my mouth to speak, people still hear an accent and ask where I am from. When I talk about the religion I feel culturally affiliated with, I hear an eerie silence. Even though my race — like the rest of the people from the Middle East — falls in…
Publication numbers in neurodegeneration are soaring. Meta’s curated collection of feeds can help you stay up to date.
By Michaela Torkar and Burcin Ikiz
Neurodegenerative diseases are devastating disorders that cause an immense economic and social burden on modern societies. This area of biomedical research is important to us at CZI and is the focus of our Neurodegeneration Challenge Network. Worldwide, there has been a substantial increase in funding of neurodegeneration research over the past decade, which has resulted in a rise in research outputs.
A recent publication trend analysis by Meta showed significant growth in the field of neurological…
Prototyping in collaboration with researchers
By Burcin Ikiz, Ph.D. & Michael Czerwinski, Ph.D.
Our goal of making Meta more powerful and useful to researchers requires a deep understanding of their knowledge discovery needs. Over the past year, we learned that these needs extend beyond the scientific literature, i.e., journal articles and preprints, to a broad set of resources that better reflect the breadth of scientific output created and disseminated by the community. …
Recent research suggests new treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases involving the gut microbiome
By Burcin Ikiz, Ph.D.
Bowels don’t readily come to mind when talking about a neurological disorder. But for James Parkinson, they did.
In his 1817 essay on shaking palsy, Parkinson described a syndrome that would later be renamed for him. The English surgeon and apothecary also mentioned an unexpected symptom: constipation.
“The bowels, which had been all along torpid, now, in most cases, demand stimulating medicines of very considerable power,” he wrote, “the expulsion of the faeces from the rectum sometimes requiring mechanical aid.”
Even though Parkinson’s…
Researchers worldwide build a decentralized learning model to improve COVID-19 diagnosis.
A few months ago, Daniel L. Rubin, a professor of biomedical data science, of radiology, and of medicine at Stanford, received an unexpected request for collaboration. A group of researchers from China and Thailand were developing a new machine learning algorithm to improve the accuracy of radiology-based COVID-19 diagnosis and needed help to make their model more robust without compromising patient privacy. Rubin — whose research uses AI to extract biomedical information from radiology images to guide physicians — had the right tool for the challenge. …
A recent study shows AI-related job growth correlates to improved social welfare through economic growth.
Artificial intelligence carries the promise of making industry more efficient and our lives easier. With that promise, however, also comes the fear of job replacement, hollowing out of the middle class, increased income inequality, and overall dissatisfaction. According to the quarterly CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness survey from October last year, 37% of workers between the ages of 18 and 24 are worried about AI eliminating their jobs.
But a recent study from two researchers affiliated with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) challenged this…
Losing the mysterious cells may lead to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or other neurological disorders
About five years ago, researchers from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle received a special donation: a piece of a live, rare brain tissue. It came from a very deep part of the brain neuroscientists usually can’t access. The donated tissue contained a rare and mysterious type of brain cells called von Economo neurons (VENs) that are thought to be linked to social intelligence and several neurological diseases.
The tissue was a byproduct of a surgery to remove a brain tumor from a patient in…
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak a pandemic today confirming the worldwide spread of the new disease. While this new description sounds scary, “all countries can still change the course of this pandemic,” reads a statement attributed to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO.
Before we panic and start hoarding hand sanitizers, we have to keep in mind that there are vulnerable people in our communities, such as elderly, people with underlying conditions, and people with cancer on chemotherapy, who need our support more than ever before. Dr. …
I was 18 years old when I moved to the U.S., a country I had never been to before, for college. I barely knew anyone. Everyone I loved was on the other side of the globe. I did not know what to do or what to expect.
Throughout the next 17 years, I had to carve my own path multiple times. Surviving living abroad, thriving in my studies first as an undergraduate studying Biomedical Computation and then as a PhD student in Neurobiology, following a career path in Science and Research, and finally transforming that career into a more flexible…
Burcin Ikiz, Ph.D.
Neuroscientist. Science Writer & Communicator. Passionately Curious Human. http://www.burcinikiz.com
