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Qualitative interpretation is a good thing when it comes to reading lung images in the fight against coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19), but quantitative analysis makes radiology reporting much more comprehensive. To that end, several research groups have begun looking to artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for reading and analyzing X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans, and helping to diagnose

One of the most pernicious side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is a steep rise in stress and mental health problems. According to a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly half of American adults say that worry and stress about the pandemic is hurting their mental health [1] . There are plenty of factors feeding into this phenomenon. People are anxious about getting sick, grieving lost loved

In March 2020 , before COVID-19 laid claim to the United States, Vice President Mike Pence briefed the press about the coronavirus outbreak, which at the time was a threat to passengers aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship moored off the coast of California [1] . At the time, cases had spiked in Iran, Italy, and Spain, but the disease was still an abstraction to most Americans. When asked about a

The human body is miraculous in its capacity to heal but it can always use a little help. Wound care traditionally consists of little more than a protective barrier, possibly with an antibacterial agent, to cover the damage while the body works its magic. Now, a new technology has opened up a more active approach to encouraging healing.

Wounds, especially chronic wounds, represent a significant clinical, social, and economic challenge. A recent retrospective analysis of Medicare beneficiaries in the United States identified that about 8.2 million people had at least one type of wound, with surgical wounds and diabetic ulcers among the most common and expensive to treat. The study also found that Medicare expenditures related to wound

More than 30% of the world’s population is overweight or obese. That is double the percentage in 1980, and it is getting worse [1] . That excess weight has been linked to numerous health conditions, notably type 2 (adult-onset) diabetes, the prevalence of which has also nearly doubled since 1980 [2] . Eating less and exercising more is good advice, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Other options such

Unlike many other states across America that struggled to get enough diagnostic tests for coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) this past spring, New Mexico was able to not only meet the demand for testing symptomatic patients, but was able to begin expanding its screening to asymptomatic individuals. How did this largely rural and relatively low-income state—among the bottom five states in population

After initial assertions that the wearing of face masks was an unnecessary public health tool in the prevention of the spread of Covid-19, the advice coming out of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suddenly changed. In early April, the CDC issued new guidelines advising people to wear face coverings in public settings where social distancing is difficult.

Students take engineering courses to learn techniques for solving problems. Thus, most engineering courses taken by undergraduate students are highly technical in nature. But, there are many additional techniques and skills that can be learned along the way. Other types of knowledge can also be incorporated into engineering science courses without diminishing the value of the engineering techniques

The title refers to the conceptual quality of being similar, as a kind of resemblance between both procedures.

The need to improve testing platforms for current and new pharmaceuticals has helped generate studies involving “organs-on-a-chip” technologies in recent years. This text, aimed at a readership including biomedical engineers, entrepreneurs, design engineers, new drug investigators, etc., attempts to survey the current state of the art in this area of endeavor. It does this well, with 15 chapters from

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An estimated 792 million people live with mental health disorders worldwide—more than one in ten people—and this number is expected to grow in the shadow of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough mental health professionals to treat all these people. Can artificial intelligence (AI) help? While many psychiatrists have different views on this question, recent

Your breath gives away a lot of information. Besides betraying that you’ve had garlic or onions for lunch, it also contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that provide quite telling biomarkers of disease. Building on the potential capability of VOCs to detect illness, the U.K. company Owlstone Medical is now developing a testing platform called Breath Biopsy [1] as a noninvasive diagnostic method

As computers have progressed over the last few decades, with their component transistors getting ever smaller and ever more numerous on a single chip, that relentless progress, famously described by Moore’s Law, has begun to bump up against fundamental physical limits to what can be done with the present etched-lines-on-silicon technology. But now, a new twist involving an inorganic molecule that has

Female reproductive medicine may not have been entirely overlooked in the history of medical research, but it has never been given the attention that it deserves. There are signs, however, that the spotlight is turning toward the most essential of human processes.

Smart technology is in cellphones, televisions, cars, and home appliances, but smart textiles haven’t inundated the market yet. While engineers have been developing new and interesting ways to marry electronics and fabrics for several years now, the average person isn’t wearing e-tights to audit vital signs during a workout, switching to electronically enhanced bed sheets to track sleep patterns, or

Athletes—and the cadre of professionals who surround them—are always looking for an edge over their opponents. Advances in technology have now made a whole new class of information readily available to athletes, coaches, trainers, and even fans. It’s called biometrics, the science of measuring and analyzing data collected from the body, such as heart rate or hormone levels.

As the global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus continues to spread, researchers from across the world are harnessing their skills and opening their labs to contribute to solutions for managing and addressing the health crisis. One area identified by hospitals and medical providers as a critical need has been the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), which is required to keep health

As the number of coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) cases in the United States began mounting in the early weeks of March, health care workers raised the alarm about a looming shortage of ventilators to treat patients. On March 30, 2020, Ford Motor Company announced plans to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days [1] , and General Motors followed suit on April 8, stating that it would deliver out

The ultimate goal of engineering in medicine and biology (EMB) researchers is to improve medical care for patients and communities all over the world by providing a collaborative environment for engineer-scientists and clinicians. In order for this collaboration to occur, however, there must be a widely indexed platform that promotes communication among researchers across a spectrum of nations, both

At this time many (if not all) colleges and universities are on lockdown, students have returned home, and classes have transitioned to online instruction. Students in capstone design courses around the country have no access to their school’s maker spaces and test equipment. Their prototype parts may be stored in a locked maker space, making it difficult to build, test, and deliver prototypes to sponsors

The term Organismic Sets described a puzzling and difficult area of research that apparently appears nowadays forgotten, for recent publications cannot be pinpointed. The objective here intends to find out what this subject deals with, not trying to go deeper in its intrincacies, for it would exceed by far the possibilities of the article. Instead, the article only calls the attention and perhaps stimulates

Ethics can be interesting and fascinatingly compelling because of the subtle natures of its solutions in ambiguous situations. Articles on ethical issues and college courses on ethics rarely present answers to the questions that are posed. That is because ethical responses are highly situational and depend a lot on commonly accepted, but not codified, beliefs, and attitudes.

This text was written by three authors, two of whom have Ph.D. degrees and specialize in applied mathematics. The authors collectively have experience in computational biology, semiconductor device modeling, ophthalmology modeling, and several related fields, these experiences are reflected in the several examples in the text. The text itself consists of some 30 chapters, which are reported in eight

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Are humans the only species with a sense of consciousness? This question has intrigued me for most of my life. Having kept pets and livestock animals, and observed wild animals from both near and far, I have often wondered just how much they know about their surroundings and their place in it. Do they know how to reason out answers to questions important to them? Are they aware of the consequences

Dreadful culprits from the minuscule world, indeed, but … what about poverty, war, and terrorism in the macroscopic nowadays world?

When it comes to their health, people want answers right now. But clinicians cannot always make snap judgments about ailments or injuries. One way to help both general practitioners and patients is to introduce technologies that deliver quick and accurate diagnoses in a standard clinical setting.

Despite the advances in developing nuclear weapons and other technologies, not much is known about the long-term effects of radiation on human health. In a world where nuclear energy could help curb carbon emissions, it almost seems paradoxical that its possible long-term risks and impacts to human health are still poorly understood. While researchers have investigated the effects of acute radiation

For nearly half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a fierce battle although no shots were actually fired. Starting in the 1940s, both started developing their arsenal of nuclear weapons, in preparation for an all-out nuclear war. The U.S. government primarily used a patch of land in Nye, NV, that was formerly a military base, to conduct their tests. It was flat with few

A range of remarkable prostheses are now available to give function back to people who have had hands, arms, feet, or legs amputated, but for all their capabilities, these devices are missing a critical feature: a real sense of touch. Without it, a patient has no tactile sensory feedback on whether they have stepped off a curb or onto a misplaced child's toy, or are gripping a Styrofoam coffee cup

Your phone scans your face to unlock its screen. A social media app offers suggestions of friends to tag in photos. Airline check-in systems verify who you are as you stare into a camera. These are just a few examples of how facial recognition technology (FRT) is now ubiquitous in everyday lives. The industries of law enforcement, Internet search engines, marketing, and security have long harnessed

War between the two worlds Eminiar VII and Vendikar had gone on for 500 years with no cessation in sight. This war was conducted by computer simulation, so that a virtual hit on one planet was retaliated by a computer-generated strike on the other. This avoided the large-scale death and destruction normally suffered during real wartime. To compensate for a war of this surgical nature, a segment of

Recognition of true merits may not be a common virtue of the human being, as often achievements are either forgotten, not seen or just buried into oblivion. History of science has plenty of examples, occasionally tainted by endless and useless accusations or even lawsuits leading nowhere.

Data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that drug overdose deaths have dropped for the first time since 1990. Between the 12-month period ending December 2017 and the 12-month period ending December 2018, there was a 5.1% decline in overdose deaths. Now the bad news: Experts still see worrisome signs in the data.

Medicine aims toward restoring, maintaining, and improving human health, and engineering aims toward restoring, maintaining and improving human wellness. Both disciplines apply knowledge from science and technology at large to accomplish such objectives. Bioengineering, also called biomedical engineering, is defined as the application of engineering principles and techniques to problems in medicine

After decades of promise tempered by setbacks, gene therapies are now bringing new treatment options for a variety of inherited and acquired diseases.

Within a decade, life will likely become a lot easier for people with low back pain. The reason is cell therapy. Research is progressing rapidly and clinical trials are ongoing for new products that promise to repair the damage at the root of back pain.

A biological pacemaker is one or more types of cellular components that, when implanted into certain regions of the heart, produce electrical stimuli that mimic that of the body's natural pacemaker cells. Somatic gene transfer, cell fusion, or cell transplantation provide a way to realize it as somatic reprogramming strategies, which involve transfer of genes encoding transcription factors to transform

From ant-man to the Incredible Shrinking Machine, society has long envisioned developing devices tiny enough to enter human cells. Such nanotechnology could revolutionize the diagnosis of diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration, span new methods of precise drug delivery, and even directly repair damaged organs.

A person who has had a myocardial infarction often gets excellent emergency treatment at a hospital, and is able to go home or even return to work in a matter of days. Despite this quick recovery, all is not perfect, because the infarction stops blood and oxygen flow, which can quickly kill heart tissue. Unlike many other types of human tissue, heart tissue doesn't regenerate, so heart function is

For $99, you can obtain a kit that includes two cotton swabs and instructions for properly collecting your own stool sample, along with oral and skin samples. Upon shipping those specimens to the Knight Lab in La Jolla, CA, you will join the ranks of "citizen scientist," becoming a contributor to the world's largest crowd-sourced microbiome research project. In return, should you have accepted this

About this Series This is the sixth and last article in a series on the dramatic transformation taking place in health informatics in large part because of the new Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. The first article provided background on health care, electronic health record systems for physicians, and the challenges they both face along with the potential

2018 was a revolutionary year in the field of chemistry as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 to three brilliant chemists (Figure 1): Dr. Frances H. Arnold-"for the directed evolution of enzymes "; Dr. George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter (jointly)-"for the phage display of peptides and antibodies" [1]. Their phenomenal contribution in controlling the

Notice to readersThis article is available in both Japanese and Spanish languages on the IEEE Pulse website: https://pulse.embs.org.

Late one spring night in 1986, around 1:30 a.m., the residents of Pripyat, a Ukrainian city of 50,000 people at the northern tip of the Dnieper River, were shaken from sleep by a giant explosion originating in the nuclear reactor of the nearby power plant in Chernobyl. It was an event that would forever change the course of their lives, and that of human history. Hundreds of people died, both directly

We are in the midst of a demographic phenomenon known as the graying of society. In more affluent countries, the population is aging. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans aged 65 and older is projected to more than double by 2060. By 2030, 20% of the U.S. population will be over 65 years old. Some other countries, including Italy, Germany, and Japan, are already at this mark

The medical benefits of mild electrical stimulation of the cranium may seem like marketing hype, but decades of clinical research studies have verified that it does alleviate symptoms in a wide range of conditions. This method delivers very-low-frequency current to electrodes placed on the head, and that tiny current spreads across the brain to influence neurons and affect brain- network connectivity

Back in the Mid-1960s rotary-dial telephones were the norm, music cassette tapes were brand new, and microwave ovens hadn't made it into houses yet. That's also when newly minted electrical engineer Thomas Furness joined a U.S. Air Force Lab and began developing what would become the first virtual reality (VR) systems, including the fighter-jet Super Cockpit that gives pilots 3D representations of

The second NeuroCAS event held 20-21 October 2018 in Cleveland, OH, USA, was attended by researchers and entrepreneurs across the fields of biosignals and neurotechnology. On the heels of the IEEE BioCAS Conference, the intent of this collaborative workshop was to offer an opportunity for those within the larger biomedical circuits and systems community interested in brain activity and neurotechnology

A tiny cockroach no bigger than a large paper clip scurries across the floor of my bio-engineering lab at the University of Connecticut, Mansfield, CT, USA. It is a robot-roach hybrid, a hardwired biological insect, a cyborg if you will, and its future high-tech brethren may one day save your life. The use of insects as platforms for small robots has an incredible number of useful applications from

About this series This is the fifth in a series of articles on the dramatic transformation taking place in health informatics in large part because of the new Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. The first article provided background on health care, electronic health record systems for physicians, and the challenges they both face along with the potential

Access to health care has long been considered to be a human right. It was formally declared in 1946 when the heads of states wrote the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO). But more than 70 years after the fact, the global community still has yet to achieve it.