
Roblyer said he expects to begin testing the device on breast cancer patients at Boston Medical Center in the next few months, but commercialization is likely several years away. The American Cancer Society recently teamed up with the Global Center for Medical Innovation’s T3 Labs to invest $100,000 in the project to help bring the technology from the lab to the commercial market. If not, treatments can be adjusted or stopped.

This device uses near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIR, light technology to measure the tumor’s hemoglobin, metabolism, water and fat levels in a noninvasive way to determine whether the chemo is working. “So there are patients who have been treated for three to six months of chemotherapy with absolutely no benefit, who are suffering the toxic side effects like hair falling out,” Dr. scans are too costly to do every day or week and they aren’t particularly good for tracking some treatments, among other factors, according to Darren Roblyer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and the head of BOTLab. Patients typically wait weeks or even months to see if treatment is working because M.R.I. She expects that her early-detection technology, which is being used at Massachusetts General, will be tested in 10 to 15 more hospitals by the end of the year.Īt Boston University’s Biomedical Optical Technologies Lab, or BOTLab, researchers have created a wearable probe that can monitor, in real-time, if chemotherapy is working on a breast-cancer patient. Her team’s system uses machine learning to detect similarities between a patient’s breast and a database of 70,000 images for which the malignant or benign outcome was known. “We published a number of studies in 20 that found we could predict Alzheimer’s at the time with 82 percent accuracy - and today we’re at about 93 percent,” he said. “We look at about 540 different metrics,” said Liam Kaufman, chief executive and co-founder of Winterlight Labs, whose firm focuses on detecting cognitive medical conditions. Sonde Health, Winterlight Labs and Beyond Verbal are among the companies developing this technology. “The manner in which we speak and the word choices we make can be evaluated to accurately detect a growing list of clinical conditions,” said Rich Ross, health care research director at Gartner, a research and advisory firm. to assess hundreds of metrics - like pitch, tone, pauses, word choices, breathing and how a person describes a photo - to detect problems. Voice analysis technology, which can detect mental and physical health conditions, like coronary artery disease, Alzheimer’s and even sleep apnea from the sound of someone’s voice, is another promising area of advancement. The Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colo., a leading orthopedic surgical hospital, became the first health facility to bring in the OpenDrives system, and talks are underway with several others, according to Mr. A.I./Real Life Series: From identifying mental disorders to making chatbots smarter, The Times is looking at A.I.’s potential to solve everyday problems.systems can write original prose and generate an image at your command. system to understand how easy it is for a computer to generate fake faces. Are These People Real?: We created our own A.I.Claims of Sentience: Google placed an engineer on paid leave after dismissing his claim that its A.I.Brue took his OpenDrives digital storage system, which had made him a tech rock star in the film and entertainment industry where he worked on productions like “Gone Girl,” “House of Cards” and “Deadpool,” and brought it to the health care sector.

So between biopsies and positron emission tomography, or PET, scans, he set out to try and change the system.


Brue attributes much of the misdiagnosis to outdated imaging tools and poor communication between radiologists and oncologists. He’s now awaiting a liver transplant in Pittsburgh. But by then, his immune system and liver had been damaged from the wrong chemotherapy treatments and from seven biopsies. Refusing to blindly accept the prognosis, he frantically searched the internet for data on his symptoms - which included a 105-degree temperature - and rushed the pathology reports to other major hospitals in the United States for additional opinions.Ī month later, doctors confirmed an error had been made and said he actually had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was treatable.
