cognitive scientist awards

  AI-powered cardiology diagnostics company Ultromics has secured a $55m (£41.4m) Series C funding round to fuel its expansion across the US.  Founded in Oxford in 2017, Ultromics develops AI technology to support clinicians in the detection of particularly elusive forms of heart failure. According to research cited by the company, Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF), among the forms detected by its technology, goes diagnosed in up to 64% of cases. “The reality is, hospitals already have the data, they just haven’t had the tools to extract diagnostic signals from it,” said Ross Upton, Ultromics founder and chief executive. “By analysing routine echocardiograms with AI, we’re helping clinicians identify high-risk patients earlier, enabling intervention before disease progresses.” The company is gearing up for significant scaling in the US, with its technology having already received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and eligibility for Med...

  To support hospitals and specialists around the world in meeting their safety standards requirements, the IAEA has produced a  series of video tutorials  on quality and dosimetry aspects of computed tomography. The new e-learning material will enhance the quality of diagnostic care for cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurological disorders and other conditions for patients worldwide.  Computed tomography (CT) utilizes X rays and computer processing to visualize structures and soft tissues within the body. Through detailed, cross-sectional and three-dimensional volumetric images, CT scanners enable medical specialists to diagnose diseases, identify injuries, plan medical treatments, guide procedures and monitor disease progression as well as treatment effectiveness.  The target audience for the series is medical physicists, who play a key role in balancing imaging quality and radiation dose.  “The videos have been designed to help medical physicists get s...

  A chest X-ray radiology report describes abnormal findings not only from X-ray obtained at a given examination, but also findings on disease progression or change in device placement with reference to the X-ray from previous examination. Majority of the efforts on automatic generation of radiology report pertain to reporting the former, but not the latter, type of findings.  To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is only one work dedicated to generating summary of the latter findings, i.e., follow-up radiology report summary. In this study, we propose a transformer-based framework to tackle this task. Motivated by our observations on the significance of medical lexicon on the fidelity of report summary generation, we introduce two mechanisms to bestow clinical insight to our model, namely disease probability soft guidance and masked entity modeling loss. The former mechanism employs a pretrained abnormality classifier to guide the presence level of specific abnormaliti...

  The Covid-19 pandemic killed an estimated 7.1 million people worldwide, causing global life expectancy to decline by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021. It disrupted economies, destroyed livelihoods, and strained social cohesion in many countries. Yet no one has been held accountable for it. Will US President-elect Donald Trump change that? Five years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19), we still do not know where the pathogen first arose. Did it emerge naturally in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, or did it escape from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where studies into bat coronaviruses were underway? We do know that China’s government allowed what might have been a local outbreak to morph into a global health crisis. After the first Covid-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored reports about the disease and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission for weeks. Meanwhile, travel to and from Wuhan ...

  Generative AI has emerged from years of advancements in  artificial intelligence , moving beyond machines that simply follow commands to ones that can create. This technology, which builds on the foundation of neural networks and deep learning, has opened up exciting possibilities—machines that can write, design, and even produce art. In this article, we'll understand what is generative AI, dive into how generative AI evolved, the different ways it's being used today, and more. Let's start! Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating or generating new content, such as images, text, music, or videos, based on patterns and examples from existing data. It involves training algorithms to understand and analyze a large dataset and then using that knowledge to generate new, original content similar in style or structure to the training data. Generative AI utilizes deep learning, neural networks, and machine learning techniques ...

  Previous research has implicated fungi in chronic neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, but there is limited understanding of how these common microbes could be involved in the development of these conditions.   Working with animal models, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions discovered how the fungus Candida albicans enters the brain, activates two separate mechanisms in brain cells that promote its clearance, and, important for the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease development, generates amyloid beta (Ab)-like peptides, toxic protein fragments from the amyloid precursor protein that are considered to be at the center of the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The study appears in the journal  Cell Reports .   “Our lab has years of experience studying fungi, so we embarked on the study of the connection between C. albicans and Alzheimer's disease in animal models,” said corresponding author  Dr. David...

  A recent study published in   PLOS Computational Biology   found that people with stronger autistic traits, particularly those with a preference for predictability, tend to exhibit unique curiosity-driven behaviors. These individuals showed persistence in tasks requiring sustained attention, often leading to superior learning outcomes. Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental condition that affects how individuals perceive and interact with the world. It is characterized by differences in communication, social interaction, and behavior patterns. Rather than being a singular condition, autism exists on a spectrum, meaning that individuals experience varying levels of intensity and expression of traits. While some may require significant support in daily life, others might navigate independently with unique strengths and challenges. Autistic traits are characteristics commonly associated with autism but may also be present in varying degrees within the general pop...

The prestigious medical journal's report was published on 19 July, raising concerns about the integrity of medical education and, in turn, the future quality of healthcare in the country.   New Delhi: Lancet has criticized what it described as “systemic corruption and inefficiencies” at the National Medical Commission (NMC) after a corruption scandal surfaced about India top medical education regulator. The prestigious medical journal's report was published on 19 July, raising concerns about the integrity of medical education and, in turn, the future quality of healthcare in the country.  On 30 June, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a criminal case naming 34 individuals, including officials from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the NMC and a few doctors responsible for inspecting Shri Rawatpura Sarkar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Nava Raipur. This happened after searches at over 40 places across five states. The CBI findin...