Author: Healthcare Propulsion Staff

Artificial intelligence company Knowtex launched a frontier AI lab for healthcare, aimed at developing and rigorously evaluating clinical AI tools for accuracy, auditability and clinician trust. The company initially focused on oncology, a specialty that demands exactness in coding, staging and longitudinal history that general-purpose AI was not built to deliver, according to executives. The Knowtex platform now extends across more than 200 specialties at more than 300 organizations nationwide, executives say. “Knowtex’s founders are Stanford AI scientists who met studying AI and linguistics,” said Caroline Zhang , Knowtex CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “When we founded Knowtex in…

A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded scientific team has shown that a new brain-computer interface (BCI) can allow people with vocal tract and bodily paralysis to convey both speech and upper-body gestures simultaneously. While BCIs have facilitated one or the other in the past, this new system is the first to enable both modes of communication at once, more closely replicating natural expression. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, used machine learning to decipher the unique brain activity that underpins concurrent speech and physical gesture in three patients. Their BCI successfully translated the thoughts of two participants into…

Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh have joined the top tier of U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of the nation’s best children’s hospitals.  The 20th edition of the closely watched rankings evaluated clinical data from 114 of the 199 eligible children’s hospitals and incorporated survey responses from more than 40% of U.S. physicians. It includes state and regional rankings, rankings across 10 pediatric specialties and an unranked Top 50 list for hospitals’ behavioral and mental health programs. Ninety of the reviewed hospitals received at least one recognition across the categories. Among these were…

Available for over a yearEver wondered why you might feel a bit unwell after a flight? There are lots of reasons for that – from dehydration, jet lag, cabin pressure and altitude. Last month, a French court recognised that cosmic radiation was a factor in a flight attendant’s breast cancer diagnosis. Studies show that cabin crew and pilots have the highest level of radiation- related cancer deaths compared to more than 500 other jobs. We’re looking at what impacts flying regularly, and for long periods of time, can have on your body. We hear from Savannah, a pilot in the…

GE HealthCare announced Tuesday the launch of a new artificial intelligence-enabled SaaS application to help healthcare organizations optimize resources and expand care access. GE HealthCare Global Chief Science and Technology Officer Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare “common pain points” for the company’s health system customers are rising patient care demands, staffing shortages and increasing costs. “In this environment, it’s more important than ever for health systems to maximize their existing resources,” Kass-Hout said. “In order to do that, they need help getting ahead of bottlenecks and resource constraints before they can cause system-wide disruptions.” That’s where CareIntellect for Operations…

Evvy, a precision medicine company focused on the vaginal microbiome, has raised an oversubscribed $40 million series B round. Evvy makes an at-home vaginal health test whose results are clinician-reviewed and offers personalized treatment plans. The round was led by Catalio Capital Management, alongside Rethink Impact, Muse Capital and Alumni Ventures, LabCorp Venture Fund, General Catalyst and others.  Evvy will lean on the capital as it pursues clinical validation of its AI-powered diagnostic and care models across women’s health, starting with fertility, and expand distribution of Evvy through physician and partner channels. “Our interest is in [exploring] biomarkers in the…

Contradicting conventional wisdom, menopause may not be the driving force behind an increase in aortic stiffness in women after midlife, according to new, independent research published today in Hypertension, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Heart Association journal. The largest blood vessel in the body, the aorta, receives oxygen-rich blood from the heart to deliver to other organs throughout the body. In many people, particularly after midlife, the walls of the aorta stiffen. Pulse pressure is influenced by the stiffness and width of the aorta and is quantified by the difference between the upper (systolic) and lower (diastolic) numbers…

Air pollution leads to different risk of bacterial pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis, depending on the subtype of bacteria a person has, new research suggests. The new study comes from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), and collaborators. The team suggests that the subtype of the bacterium, Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae), together with air pollution exposure impacts the rate and timing of invasive disease – with some strains linked to immediate infection after air pollution exposure, and some taking several weeks. Published today (14 September) in Nature Microbiology, the researchers also found that older…

When women take part in breast cancer screening, they are informed that screening may detect cancers that would never have caused symptoms or problems during their lifetime. This is known as overdiagnosis. The extent of overdiagnosis has been one of the most debated issues in breast cancer screening for decades. Estimates from randomized trials have varied widely, with some suggesting that as many as 30-50% of breast cancers detected through screening may represent overdiagnosis. These estimates have played an important role in the international debate about the benefits and harms of population-based breast cancer screening. – The aim of our…

Much like a courier reading an address on a package, neurons must deliver RNA to the precise locations where it is needed. A KAIST research team has discovered how a small chemical modification on RNA acts as a “delivery tag,” helping selected RNAs travel to distant regions of neurons. The findings provide a basis for investigating RNA “delivery errors” in brain disorders – cases in which RNA is produced normally but fails to reach its intended destination – and may ultimately inform the development of new therapeutic strategies.KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on September 14 that a research team led…