Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

artificial intelligence

Radiologists wrestle with robots – ethically

Radiologists look at and analyze images, tasks computer algorithms can do. This is fertile soil for artificial intelligence (AI) — enough so that some predict that AI will replace radiologists.

John Banja, PhD

Emory bioethicist John Banja says: don’t believe the hype. AI will generate tools radiologists will want to use, he says. But human experts will have plenty to do, including making sure that the algorithms are properly vetted and trained on appropriate data.

“We already know what a lot of the ethical issues are going to be…informed consent, privacy, data protection, ownership, all that kind of stuff,” Banja recently told Health Imaging. “What we need to do is drill down to the next level, especially the practice level.”

Banja has received a grant from the Advanced Radiology Services Foundation to support a series of podcasts with radiologists over the next two years. He will be teaming up with Emory radiologist Rich Duszak, a specialist in health policy, and Norm Beauchamp, medical dean at Michigan State.

Banja and Duszak are still planning podcast sessions and lining up interviews, but they said the first episode will be on “AI hype”, and the second will cover standard of care/medical malpractice, with future issues on FDA standards.

Duszak comments on how radiologists need to take control of the algorithms in this video.

Also, with radiology chair Carolyn Meltzer, Banja recently published a review on ethics related to radiology and AI, exploring issues such as selection bias and stretching algorithms too far. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Predict the future of critical care in #STATMadness

Emory is participating in STAT Madness, a “March Madness” style bracket competition featuring biomedical research advances instead of basketball teams. Universities or research institutes nominate their champions, research papers that were published the previous year. It’s like “Battle of the Bands.” Whoever gets the loudest — or most numerous — cheers wins.

Please check out all 64 entries, follow the 2019 STAT Madness bracket and vote here:
https://www.statnews.com/feature/stat-madness/bracket/

Emory’s entry for 2019:
It’s like the “precogs” who predict crime in the movie Minority Report, but for sepsis, the deadly response to infection. Shamim Nemati and colleagues have been exploring ways to analyze vital signs in ICU patients and predict sepsis, hours before clinical staff might otherwise notice.

As landmark clinical studies have documented, every hour of delay in giving someone with sepsis antibiotics increases their risk of mortality. So detecting sepsis as early as possible could save thousands of lives. Many hospitals have developed “sniffer” systems that monitor patients for sepsis, but this algorithm tries to spot problems way before they become apparent.

As published in 2018 in Critical Care Medicine, the algorithm can predict sepsis onset—with some false alarms—four, eight, even 12 hours ahead of time. No algorithm is going to be perfect, but it was better than any other previous sepsis predictor. The technology is headed for additional testing and evaluation at several medical centers, as part of a project supported by the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

You can fill out a whole bracket or you can just vote for Emory. The contest will last several rounds. The first round began on Monday, March 4, and lasts until the end of the week. Before 10 am Eastern time Monday morning, there were already more than 5,000 brackets entered!

If Emory advances, then people will be able to continue voting for us starting on Friday. Emory’s first opponent is a regional rival, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. We are on the upper left side of the bracket.

STAT News is a Boston-based news organization covering biomedical research, pharma and biotech. If you feel like it, please share on social media using the hashtag #statmadness.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment