Leslie Saxon MD: "We live in a data mining society"

.@DrLeslieSaxon: "FB should have our med data!" http://t.co/wATp9uhkCt Gr8 pres! #mhealth #CDoM #bigdata "We live in a data mining society"
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) May 26, 2014

"20% Doctors Included"

http://www.khoslaventures.com/20-percent-doctor-included-speculations-and-musings-of-a-technology-optimist

.@vkhosla gets #DigitalHealth's potential: “20% doctor included”: Speculations and musings of a technology optimist http://t.co/oAAfuGzlcv
— Paul Sonnier (@Paul_Sonnier) May 20, 2014

Article by Vinod Khosla:

"Healthcare today is broken. It’s the result of approaching medicine according to practice and tradition, rather than real science primed by objective data, and unencumbered with the conflicts of interest that lead to suboptimal results. Doctors today are doing the best they can given the current system, but we should embrace the new opportunities ahead of us.
Technology will reinvent healthcare as we know it. It is inevitable that, in the future, the majority of physicians’ diagnostic, prescription and administrative work, which over time may approach 80-percent of total doctor time, will be replaced by smart hardware and software. Healthcare will become more scientific and more consistent, delivering better-quality care with inexpensive data-gathering techniques, continual monitoring, more rigorous science and more available and ubiquitous information leading to personalized patient insight. Many new findings will be outside the reach of most physicians because of the volume of data and the unique holistic insights that data will provide about a patient’s very complex condition. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of data points may go into diagnosing a condition and monitoring the progress of a therapy or prescription, well beyond the capability of any human to adequately consider.
This evolution from an entirely human-based healthcare system to an increasingly automated system will take time, and there are many ways in which it can happen. Today’s traditional approaches will get better as new approaches, and even new medicine, will be invented. The remaining 20-percent of physicians’ work will be AMPLIFIED, making them even more effective. Doctors will be able to operate at substantially improved levels of expertise in multiple domains, and they also will be able to handle many more patients. The primary care physician and maybe even the nurse practitioner may be able to operate at the level of six specialists handling six areas of care for one patient with multiple comorbidities in a more coordinated and comprehensive manner without inter-specialist conflicts. This transition will affect each group of actors in the current system differently. Some constituencies will be affected favorably in some dimensions and worse in others, but the net benefit will be substantially positive for society and individual patients but it is likely that a focus on science, data, and personalization will lead to plenty of unintended benefits that we cannot anticipate today. Nurses will be made much more capable by technology, often replacing the functions only doctors perform today. New medical insights, including ones we cannot yet envision, will be commonplace, and the practices we follow will be substantially better validated by more rigorous scientific methods.
My statements are not forecasts that the hospital burn unit or emergency department will run without any humans on staff. Though the early changes will appear underwhelming and clumsy, by 2025 they will seem obvious, inevitable and well beyond the changes we might envision today. Expect today’s expert doctors to think these changes are implausible when they are asked about this possibility, and expect the classic response of “human judgment will not be replaced by technology” from people who are not qualified to judge what software technology in 2030 might be capable of.  Of course, the possibility also exists that a much more cooperative system leveraging both humans and technological systems in their respective strengths may also evolve, as proposed in the book Race Against the Machine, but the core functions necessary for complex diagnoses will more than likely be driven by machine judgment instead of human judgment.
The transition will happen in fits and starts along different pathways with many course corrections, steps backward and mistakes as we figure out the best approach. Given the importance of having clarity on what I hypothesize as my forecasts, I want to be clear that they are only directional guesses rather than precise predictions. Further, though many different disciplines will contribute to the innovation in medicine like biological research or new device development, I am mostly concerned with the contributions of digital health technologies to medical innovation. This should not be underemphasized, as these contributions, though potentially the most significant, are also the most variable, and hardest to predict in direction, timelines and scope..."

Henry Mash, neurosurgeon: "Nobody really understands the brain"

#BrainDeath Henry Mash, neurosurgeon: "Nobody really understands the brain" http://t.co/HCOLkVR4yb @GuardianBooks :) pic.twitter.com/OvlFtupMV1
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) May 12, 2014

http://www.pbs.org/pov/englishsurgeon/interview_henrymarsh.php

Published 13 March 2014

"What is it like to be a brain surgeon?

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason?

How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong?

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, Henry Marsh must make agonising decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.

If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practised by calm and detached surgeons, this griping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candour, one of the country's leading neurosurgeons reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humour that characterise a brain surgeon's life.

DO NO HARM is an unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions."

Dr. Henry Marsh's segment starts at 17:52 on following audio link (source: Guardian books podcast)

==> DOWNLOAD AUDIO LINK

Well, I've read "Do No Harm"... Reminds me of the three surgeons in my family, really... The book was scary, I even felt like puking on a couple of occasions... After reading this book, I asked the surgeons in my family: "Are we so sure about brain death? are those people really dead?" Their answer was unanimous -- which I found quite striking, because I can tell you, they usually disagree on a lot of things -- "- We dunno for sure." 

"Nobody really understands the brain", says Dr. Henry Mash at the end of this interview (The Guardian Books Podcast). Yeah, at least I got that part right, I think...

Wow.

So, lemme get this straight: a highly experienced brain surgeon stated -- in May 2014 -- that "nobody really understands the brain", and yet, at Harvard Med School in Boston, they did define "brain death" as death (from a legal point of view, too) in... 1968! Did we know more about the brain in 1968 than we do now? Doesn't seem to make sense... A few years ago (in 2008), same Harvard Med School said that, well, you know, "brain death" is not striclty equivalent to death, so, maybe, just maybe, we could extend the concept of death definition in the perspective of organ donation to "donation under cardiac death" -- since, well, "brain death" was already included... (read here). So, again, wow. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be read between the lines, here... Since we've got these "wonderful" immunosuppressive drugs, we need to tweak and twist the definition of death. And yet, try as hard as we may for organ "donation" industrialization, the problem of organ donation *shortage* remains... Not enough *dead* people... Yikes.

First in-depth mammal brain map to reveal neural blips

Great, this has been done quite recently (2 April 2014, NewScientist)... eeerrrr... for the mouse (not the humans: not quite there yet)... And there is this cool Human Connectome Project...

http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org

As a conclusion... Well, I know the surgeons in my family will hate this, since in their opinion, Google equals "the death of surgeons" and doctors will be replaced with algorithms -- all Google's fault, mind you... And er, yes, the surgeons in my family are bio-luddites who seem to think I am Ray Kurzweil's PA -- and Siri is my middle name ;-)

http://www.foodista.com/blog/2012/10/02/mayim-bialik-trashes-meat-for-peta

La mort des chirurgiens http://t.co/UN0TqfJnw5
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) May 12, 2014

Healthcare industry expansion means that employment for physicians & surgeons is expected to grow nearly 20% by 2022: http://t.co/qGwv6qdcJG
— Forbes (@Forbes) May 14, 2014

Post by Catherine Coste.

Will Google underestimate the complexity of the brain?

Yesterday, I was taking a stroll at the U of I... Spooky, isn't it?... and yet interesting...

"ALMA MATER To thy happy children/Of the future/Those of the past/Send greetings."

@Nirnever @Rue89 Kurzweil sous estime la complexité du cerveau. Mais le fonctionnement de notre cerveau est codé dans l'ADN, quand même.
— Laurent Alexandre (@dr_l_alexandre) May 9, 2014

Henry Mash, neurosurgeon: "Nobody really understands the brain" http://t.co/HCOLkVR4yb Will #Google learn the lesson? pic.twitter.com/Raa6GiESck
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) May 15, 2014

MIT Lists its 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2014

2014's top breakthrough technologies, according to MIT @techreview: http://t.co/KqjJmk9GTH
— The Futurist (@WFSFuturist_Mag) May 14, 2014

(Part 1)

MIT Tech Review lists top breakthrough technologies, part 2: http://t.co/xryU5pheT5
— The Futurist (@WFSFuturist_Mag) May 15, 2014

(Part 2)

“Med speed is slow. Tech speed is fast”

Some truths about #healthIT and #innovation: http://t.co/3mAsyvG3u6 #bigdata #mhealth #digitalhealth #HealthAnalytics
— Neil Versel (@nversel) May 14, 2014

Speaking as a physician, Mostashari said, “Most of what determines our outcomes isn’t what happens in our office.”

"3D Printed Artificial Kidneys Created By UConn Students"

http://www.nuviun.com/blog/3D-Printed-Artificial-Kidneys-Created-By-UConn-Students

@UConnEngineer Students Create 3D Printed Artificial #Kidneys - http://t.co/JTnTlJ6oTE #digitalhealth #3Dprinting #Technology #mhealth
— nuviun (@Nuviun) May 15, 2014

.@UConn students 3D print a pair of artificial kidneys: http://t.co/5sP7ZfQ03r #Atmel #3DPrinting pic.twitter.com/OxHi8PJ8YN
— Atmel University (@AtmelUniversity) May 13, 2014

"If successful, the project can provide a low-cost but effective alternative to the approximately 2 million people who are on renal replacement therapy worldwide.
In the GCC countries, there is scarce data about ESRD incidence rates, but a 2012 meta-study said that 'Many reports have provided evidence of increasing prevalence of the most common causes of ESRD in the GCC such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.'
According to the study, majority of ESRD patients in the GCC countries are on hemodialysis. They would benefit from receiving 3D artificial kidneys if the technology ultimately makes it possible to receive these organs with similar risk compared to receiving real kidneys.
There have been many studies demonstrating how 3D printing technology can go beyond the hype and into applications that impact healthcare, particularly replacing body parts with 3D printed ones, even transplanting live kidneys and livers straight from a 3D printer.
The UConn project recalls to mind a recent, similar project by Japanese surgeons who created 3D-printed tumor-containing kidneys for simulated cancer surgery. Other scientists have also shown how a 3D model of a tumor itself can provide clues to curing cancer.
Other studies demonstrated successful implantation of a 3D printed skull, as well as the creation of 3D-printed artificial eyes, noses and ears." (Source)

"How about gene mutation specific immunotherapy?"

Excellent, Matt How about mutation specific immunoRx? RT @matthewherper Is This How We'll Cure Cancer? http://t.co/oNenW32eb6 @Forbes
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) May 7, 2014

"Getting started in social media for healthcare professionals"

Getting started in social media for healthcare professionals http://t.co/KL007qkx7Q
— Matthew Katz (@subatomicdoc) May 1, 2014

Getting started in social media for healthcare professionals from Matt Katz, MD

Not a scientist? Become one in four months with MIT 7.00x MOOC: "The Secret of Life", starting June 17, 2014. Enrol now, it's free!

MIT MOOC 7.00x "The Secret of Life"?! What's that?? To answer your question, here's the best read I was able to find:

http://t.co/9mFE4eyeGf
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) January 8, 2014

This course will be live in June 2014! Enrol now!

https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-7-00x-introduction-biology-secret-1768#.U1eeLVfSmVq

Now, about my own experience: becoming gene savvy in four months?! How do you do that?

Healthcare consumers will need to become increasingly savvy regarding their genes...

Not a scientist? Become one in four months with MIT 7.00x MOOC: "The Secret of Life"

 (PDF Doc, 4 pages).

@edXOnline Not a scientist? Become 1 in 4 months w/ MIT 7.00x MOOC:'The Secret of Life' http://t.co/fKDGGbvpUZ Big thx 2 7.00x PED DreamTeam
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) January 7, 2014

@MITBiology Not a scientist? Become 1 in 4 months w/ MIT 7.00x MOOC:'The Secret of Life' http://t.co/fKDGGbvpUZ Big thx2 7.00x PED DreamTeam
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) January 7, 2014

==> Software Tools that are being used for MIT Genomics courses: see here. 

Check out this Firefox add-on "Awesome Screenshot", Easily capture and annotate screenshot. http://t.co/v1q52Whgm9 via @diigo
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) January 12, 2014

Amazing!! With the help of this really "Awesome Sreenshot" software, I've been able to print each and every screen/page, with all the problem sets and midterm and final exams, including correction! 101 documents that will come in handy whenever I will feel like I need to review some or all of this stuff that gave me so much fun and challenge -- and that I came to love ;-)

Documenting all the way from Organ Donation to CRISPR!

Documenting all the way from Organ Donation to #CRISPR! The blog I started early 2005: http://t.co/yySTjeshwT #OrganDonation #genomics #CDoM
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) April 21, 2014

"Edico Genome Aims at Data Processing Bottleneck in Whole Genome Sequencing"

A whole lot of data compression goin' on: SD startup Edico Genome targets big bottleneck in genome sequencing http://t.co/0xqLp03ZQP
— Bruce V. Bigelow (@BVBigelow) April 17, 2014

"By mounting Edico’s proprietary Dragen processor on a standard computer expansion bus (similar to a graphics processing card) that is dedicated for genomics processing, van Rooyen says Edico’s technology could be installed in any next-generation sequencing machine—and would reduce the time needed to map a genome from 20 hours to 20 minutes.  (...) Van Rooyen says the underlying innovation of Edico’s technology is in the way the company implemented the genome-mapping algorithm, incorporating data compression techniques into a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a processor that is configured for specialized use after it is manufactured. (...) The company already is moving its design to a standard ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) processor, which typically can be mass-produced at low cost. (...) Van Rooyen’s commercialization plan calls for mounting the Dragen processor on cards that have been customized to work with specific genome sequencing machines, such as Illumina’s HiSeq X Ten. (...) By using Edico’s technology, van Rooyen says a facility using Illumina’s HiSeq X Ten machines to sequence 150 human genomes every three days would be able to save $6 million over a four-year period. (...) That would make it easier for hospitals and other healthcare providers to use genome sequencing to better diagnose heart disease, inflammatory disease, prenatal disease, and other conditions."

https://twitter.com/EdicoGenome

"With the arrival of next-generation gene sequencing machines like the Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) HiSeq X Ten, medicine has been moving to develop new ways of using genomic data to treat patients. Last month, for example, J. Craig Venter unveiled plans to sequence the entire genome of every patient entering the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center as an initial goal for his latest startup, Human Longevity Inc.
At the same time, though, it’s becoming clear that generating genomic data for thousands of cancer patients involves working with very large numbers—and that means a wave of new opportunities for innovation are emerging as genomics and Big Data come together. One startup moving to catch this wave is Edico Genome, a San Diego startup founded last year to fix a bottleneck in the way the data being generated by the HiSeq X Ten and other next-generation sequencing machines is processed.
Edico has developed a specialized computer processor for ordering the readout of nucleotides—A, C, T, or G—from short segments of DNA generated by next-generation sequencing technology so they align with a reference genome. It’s a process that genomics specialists refer to as 'mapping.'
It is a Big Data problem. The human genome consists of roughly 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs (made of that four-letter alphabet of DNA) that encode between 20,000 and 25,000 genes."

"AlloMap: 11-gene (blood RNA) signature for monitoring rejection after cardiac transplant"

Identification of Common Blood Gene Signatures for the Diagnosis of Renal and Cardiac Acute Allograft Rejection http://t.co/pF5PV3ECbD
— CATHERINE COSTE (@cathcoste) April 16, 2014

Much less painful than post-transplant biopsy ( for monitoring rejection after cardiac transplant) for heart and/or renal transplant patients!

https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/genomicmedicine/McCarthy-GenomicMedicineADecade.pdf

https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/genomicmedicine/McCarthy-GenomicMedicineADecade.pdf

"Cambridge Company Creates iPad-Sized Tech to Diagnose Diseases in Real-Time "

Cambridge Company Creates iPad-Sized Tech to Diagnose Diseases in Real-Time http://t.co/mNzubILFso via @BostInno
— David R. Bachinsky (@drbachinsky) April 13, 2014

"What consumers want for their medical care"

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/454317401895489536/photo/1

What consumers want for their medical care @PwC_LLP new report and survey--well done! #indivmed pic.twitter.com/1G9Cy2wgK5
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 10, 2014

"Where Does It Hurt?" An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care

http://www.athenahealth.com/jonathan-bush/where-does-it-hurt.php

"New eBook series offers practical advice for healthcare entrepreneurs from their peers "

New eBook series offers practical advice for healthcare entrepreneurs from their peers http://t.co/Ob0DegXDJd
— MedCity News (@medcitynews) April 8, 2014

Eric Topol MD: "If we want to stay healthy, we might want to get used to seeing images of our own bodies’ inner workings – on our own smartphones"

http://seniorplanet.org/eric-topol-on-the-health-revolution

"These days, as director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, chief academic officer at Scripps Health and co-founder of the West Health Institute,  Topol is busy boosting our involvement as patients in our own healthcare through wireless health innovations, such as using mobile technology to check our own blood sugar or take our own EKG.

" Genentech signs five-year collaboration with Patients Like Me for patient data"

We are excited to enter patient-centric research collaboration with @PatientsLikeMe http://t.co/FICWMRF4E0
— Genentech (@genentech) April 7, 2014

Wonder how pats will feel? RT @matthewherper: Genentech signs five-year collaboration with @patientslikeme for patient data. Interesting.
— Sally Church (@MaverickNY) April 7, 2014

"Population Medicine 2014"

Population medicine 2014 http://t.co/2j5Bby5Oaz + http://t.co/0UCDNYCHMg #BreastCancer screening @JAMA_current pic.twitter.com/OvxIHOpdoQ
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 5, 2014

Digital medicine and the modern social contract: call to action. Knowledge sharing "to meet the human obligation of beneficence"

An #mHealth call to action http://t.co/qEu5TRxnBA @NorthShoreWeb @HIMSS #HIT @mhealth_news
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 4, 2014

Digital medicine and the modern social contract http://t.co/mqNC7xmMfQ Knowledge sharing "to meet the human obligation of beneficence"
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 4, 2014