News by Subject Medicine & Health

A low-tech problem troubles the high-tech world of digital pathology imaging: There are no reliable standards for the quality of digitized tissue slides comprising the source material for computers reading and analyzing vast numbers of images. Poor-quality slides get mixed in with accurate slides, potentially confusing a computer program trying to learn what a cancerous cell looks like. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University are trying to fix this, sharing an open-source quality control standard.

Scientists at Christiana Care Health System's Gene Editing Institute and NovellusDx, an Israeli biotechnology company, have deployed a breakthrough CRISPR gene-editing tool to successfully engineer multiple edits simultaneously to fragments of DNA extracted from a human cell, according to a new study published today in The CRISPR Journal. The tool can rapidly reproduce, in a human DNA sample, the unique and complex genetic features of an individual patient's cancer tumor.

Harmonization method developed to reduce site-related differences between neuroimaging data from individual imaging sites and publicly released big data of multiple psychiatric disorders from many imaging sites.

Previous research has suggested that specific factors about the doctor performing colonoscopy -- for example, a gastroenterologist versus a surgeon, female versus male -- were associated with different rates of detection of precancerous polyps. However, a Cleveland Clinic-led research team found that those previously described differences among endoscopists are not true.

To improve the treatment of children with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), investigators have developed a sophisticated way to analyze the microbial and metabolic contents of the gut. A report in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, describes how a new battery of tests enables researchers to distinguish patients with IBS from healthy children and identifies correlations between certain microbes and metabolites with abdominal pain. With this information, doctors envision tailoring nutritional and targeted therapies that address a child's specific gastrointestinal problems.

UCLA researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system to help radiologists improve their ability to diagnose prostate cancer.