Surgalign Holdings has announced that it has received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance for its HOLO Portal surgical guidance system for use within lumbar spine procedures. According to Surgalign, the HOLO Portal system is the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-driven augmented reality (AR) guidance system for spine and the first clinical application of Surgalign's HOLO AI digital health platform. Terry Rich, president and chief executive officer of Surgalign, said: "Receiving the initial clearance for the HOLO Portal system is a significant milestone and represents a critical step toward building the foundation of the digital surgery of the future. This system is designed to improve patient outcomes by delivering intelligent solutions to our customers, and we believe it is truly revolutionary. "With clearance in hand for our guidance application, our near-term focus is getting the platform into the hands of surgeons as we work towards a market release.

Gibson Dunn lawyers examine a number of the most significant developments from 2021 affecting companies as they navigate the evolving AI and autonomous systems landscape.

Elon Musk has demonstrated the Neuralink brain chip in a pig, a monkey and we could soon see preform in a human brain. The firm posted a new job listing for a clinical trial director, which says the right candidate will'work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink's first Clinical Trial participants.' The position is based in Fremont, California and provides the candidate with commuter benefits, meals and'an opportunity to change the world.' It also indicates that the job will mean leading and building'the team responsible for enabling Neuralink's clinical research activities,' as well as adhering to regulations. Neuralink posted a new job listing, first spotted by Bloomberg, for a clinical trial director, which says the right candidate will'work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink's first Clinical Trial participants Although the posting does not say when the trials will begin, Musk revealed last month that they are less than a year away - meaning human trials could start this year.

Elon Musk's brain implant company Neuralink is now hiring a clinical trial director, an indication that the company's longstanding goal of implanting chips in human brains is coming closer. The trial director position would oversee the startup's long-promised human trials of its medical device, according to the listing. Neuralink's brain implant -- which Musk has said already allows monkeys to play video games with their thoughts alone -- is intended to help treat a variety of neurological disorders, such as paralysis. The job description for the position, based in Fremont, California, promises that the applicant will "work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers" as well as with "Neuralink's first Clinical Trial participants." It also indicates that the job will mean leading and building "the team responsible for enabling Neuralink's clinical research activities," as well as adhering to regulations.

DEERFIELD, Ill., Jan. 18, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Surgalign Holdings, Inc., (NASDAQ: SRGA) a global medical technology company focused on elevating the standard of care by driving the evolution of digital health, today announced that it has received U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance for its HOLO Portal surgical guidance system for use within lumbar spine procedures. The HOLO Portal system is the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-driven augmented reality (AR) guidance system for spine and the first clinical application of Surgalign's HOLOTM AI digital health platform. "Receiving the initial clearance for the HOLO Portal system is a significant milestone and represents a critical step toward building the foundation of the digital surgery of the future. This system is designed to improve patient outcomes by delivering intelligent solutions to our customers, and we believe it is truly revolutionary," said Terry Rich, Surgalign's president and chief executive officer. "With clearance in hand for our guidance application, our near-term focus is getting the platform into the hands of surgeons as we work towards a market release. While the current capabilities of the HOLO Portal system have the potential to offer a quantum leap in the way surgical procedures are performed, we have a much larger vision for our HOLO AI digital health platform across a variety of healthcare specialties and throughout the care continuum."

As pandemic-led isolation triggers an epidemic of loneliness, Japanese are increasingly turning to "social robots" for solace and mental healing. At the city's Penguin Cafe, proud owners of the electronic dog Aibo gathered recently with their cyber-pups in Snuglis and fancy carryalls. From camera-embedded snouts to their sensor-packed paws, these high-tech hounds are nothing less than members of the family, despite a price tag of close to $3,000 -- mandatory cloud plan not included. It's no wonder Aibo has pawed its way into hearts and minds. Re-launched in 2017, Aibo's artificial intelligence-driven personality is minutely shaped by the whims and habits of its owner, building the kind of intense emotional attachments usually associated with kids, or beloved pets. Noriko Yamada rushed to order one, when her mother-in-law began showing signs of dementia several years ago.

The consumer Internet began life in 1969 with four nodes, three in California and one in Utah. We know how the Internet changed how we shop, watch movies and travel. Our moonshot mission, which Dr. Anthony Chang has called a pediatric Internet made history in 2021 as we ended the year with four edge zones, two in California, one in Pennsylvania and one in Italy. We are only beginning to understand how it will transform children's healthcare, globally. Thank you for believing in the vision and helping turn it into a reality. One of the powers of the edge cloud is using digital twin applications to standardize data coming from the machines.

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the term real-world data (RWD) refers to routinely collected data relating to patient health status and the delivery of healthcare services, and real-world evidence (RWE) is the clinical evidence regarding the usage and potential benefits or risks of a medical product derived from the analysis of RWD. Both RWD and RWE have increasingly attracted attention in the healthcare industry for years now, and rightly so, considering that the healthcare analytics market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 28.9% between now and 2026. There's no doubt that within this massive data trove, there exist countless insights that could streamline care delivery, help physicians diagnose disease faster, and improve treatment strategies – if only we could identify them. This data revolution we are experiencing in the healthcare industry necessitates the appropriate tools and approaches to work with higher dimensional data sources to truly harvest the insights buried in RWD. Machine learning, an area of artificial intelligence (AI) consisting of a collection of methodologies that focus on algorithmically learning efficient representations of data and extracting insights from data, offers promise and has consistently been gaining traction within the industry in the context of RWD.

Graph representation learning has drawn increasing attention in recent years, especially for learning the low dimensional embedding at both node and graph level for classification and recommendations tasks. To enable learning the representation on the large-scale graph data in the real world, numerous research has focused on developing different sampling strategies to facilitate the training process. Herein, we propose an adaptive Graph Policy-driven Sampling model (GPS), where the influence of each node in the local neighborhood is realized through the adaptive correlation calculation. Specifically, the selections of the neighbors are guided by an adaptive policy algorithm, contributing directly to the message aggregation, node embedding updating, and graph level readout steps. We then conduct comprehensive experiments against baseline methods on graph classification tasks from various perspectives. Our proposed model outperforms the existing ones by 3%-8% on several vital benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in real-world datasets.

It is no longer a question of if artificial intelligence (AI) will play a role in healthcare delivery and diagnostics. Instead, the question is how the technology can ethically be deployed to fill this role, and what guidelines should be put in place today, to support upstream thinking around challenges that will arise tomorrow. AI still feels a tad like the "Wild West," with both limited and splintered policies and laws around regulating and managing the use of the technology, especially in the healthcare arena. However, ahead of the curve, the World Health Organization (WHO) is already prompting leaders to consider ethical responsibilities and dilemmas of integrating AI more heavily into care, posing questions around maintaining human autonomy, ensuring transparency, and establishing inclusiveness and equity– just to name a few! While this is a tall order, it is one that governing bodies and leaders will need to fill.