Health care

Axios reporter Marisa Fernandez writes that researchers from MIT and Wilson Labs will be analyzing data from seven organ procurement organizations as part of an effort to better understand the American organ procurement system. "Working with this data is a first step towards making better decisions about how to save more lives through organ procurement and transplantation,” says Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi. “We have an opportunity to use machine learning to understand potential issues and lead improvements in transparency and equity.”

Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18 speaks with Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma about the inspiration for her startup BloomerTech, which is focused on addressing heart disease in women, and the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials. As part of this effort, BloomerTech is developing a “sensor-enabled bra that feeds real-time heart data to doctors running clinical trials on women’s cardiovascular disease.”

Writing for The Boston Globe, Visiting Prof. Susan J. Blumenthal and research scientist David Kong underscore the need to reimagine America’s public health infrastructure. “A new multidisciplinary academic field of public health technology should be established to integrate diverse expertise in public health, technology, engineering, data analytics, and design to help build the products, programs, and systems necessary to modernize the nation’s public health infrastructure and ready it for 21st-century challenges and opportunities,” they write.

Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Castellanos spotlights Prof. Markus Buehler’s work combining virtual reality with sound waves to help detect subtle changes in molecular motions. Castellanos notes that Buehler and his team recently found, “coronaviruses can be more lethal or infectious depending on the vibrations within the spike proteins that are found on the surface of the virus.”

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Amy Finkelstein explores the need to reign in prices of drugs administered by physicians. “Economists tend to favor letting the private sector set prices, but this requires a well-functioning market,” writes Finkelstein. “In trying to base its payments on what other customers pay, Medicare has distorted the market for physician-administered drugs beyond reason.”

New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz spotlights a study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that demonstrated how Medicaid coverage could improve Americans’ financial health. “It’s a misnomer — it’s not just to insure your health,” says Finkelstein. “It’s actually to protect you economically in the event of poor health.”

A recent review by MIT researchers finds that “only about 23% of machine learning studies in health care used multiple datasets to establish their results, compared to 80% in the adjacent field of computer vision, and 58% in natural language processing,” writes Casey Ross for STAT. “If the performance results are not reproduced in clinical care to the standard that was used during [a study], then we risk approving algorithms that we can’t trust,” says graduate student Matthew McDermott. “They may actually end up worsening patient care.”

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. Amy Finkelstein makes the case that cash transfers can do more to help the poor than expanding health insurance. “Cash helps recipients directly, while health insurance would pay mainly for care that many uninsured people were already receiving at low or no cost,” writes Finkelstein.

Prof. Evan Lieberman speaks with Craig LeMoult of GBH about his new study, which finds there are mixed reactions when people are informed of the racial disparities in Covid-19 outcomes in the U.S. “We are so interconnected as a society - economically, socially, politically,” says Lieberman, “and [it’s important] to remind everyone that we are all potential vectors for this epidemic so it really behooves all of us to cooperate and to be able to end this pandemic as soon as possible.”

Wired reporter Max Levy spotlights Prof. Emery Brown and Earl Miller’s research examining how neurons in the brain operate as “consciousness emerges and recedes—and how doctors could better control it.” Levy writes that “Miller and Brown's work could make anesthesia safer, by allowing anesthesiologists who use the EEG to more precisely control drug dosages for people who are unconscious.”

Principal research scientist Leo Anthony Celi speaks with STAT reporter Katie Palmer about the importance of open data sharing in medical research, his new role as editor of PLOS Digital Health, and the challenges facing machine learning in medicine. “With digitization, we’re hoping each country will have an opportunity to create their own medical knowledge system,” says Celi.

Professor Martin Bazant and Professor John Bush have developed a new safety guideline to limit the risk of airborne Covid-19 transmission in different indoor settings. “For airborne transmission, social distancing in indoor spaces is not enough, and may provide a false sense of security,” says Bazant. “Efficient mask use is the most effective safety measure, followed by room ventilation, then filtration,” adds Bush.

CNN reporter Maggie Fox writes that MIT researchers have developed a new formula for calculating the risk of airborne Covid-19 transmission in indoor settings. "To minimize risk of infection, one should avoid spending extended periods in highly populated areas. One is safer in rooms with large volume and high ventilation rates," write Profs. Martin Bazant and John Bush.
 

Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a robotic dog outfitted with a tablet that allows doctors to visit with emergency room patients remotely. “The robot could therefore avoid the risk of exposure to Covid-19 by healthcare professionals and help save the personal protective equipment necessary for each visit,” writes Ruggiero Corcella of Corriere della Sera.

Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) researchers have developed a new lab-free immune profiling assay that can be used “to better profile aggressive, rapidly changing host immune response in cases of infection, for example COVID-19,” reports HealthCare Asia Daily.