Artificial intelligence has been employed in the fight against dementia by scientists who say it can diagnose the condition from a single scan of the brain. Currently in pre-clinical trials, the system has been able to diagnose dementia years before the first symptoms develop, even with no signs of damage on the scan. It currently takes multiple scans and tests to diagnose dementia, and by the time they are complete it may be too late to enact some of the remedies that can offset the condition, researchers from the Alan Turing Institute in Cambridge explained. The new system compares brain scans of those worried they might have dementia with scans from thousands of dementia patients to identify patterns. Being able to diagnose the condition early, even before any signs are visible on scans, will allow for lifestyle and medical interventions to delay the onset, according to the team.

A federal rule that requires health care providers to offer patients free, convenient and secure electronic access to their personal medical records went into effect earlier this year. However, providing patients with access to clinician notes, test results, progress documentation and other records doesn't automatically equip them to understand those records or make appropriate health decisions based on what they read. "Medicalese" can trip up even the most highly educated layperson, and studies have shown that low health literacy is associated with poor health outcomes. University of Notre Dame researcher John Lalor, an assistant professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the Mendoza College of Business, is part of a team working on a web-based natural language processing system that could increase the health literacy of patients who access their records through a patient portal. NoteAid, a project based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, conveniently translates medical jargon for health care consumers.

As scientists around the world race to see if they can come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus, one thing is clear to the experts at ML6: artificial intelligence can help. ML6, a machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) expert with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK, says its tools can help life sciences companies find new drugs to test, match patients with trials and improve quality controls in manufacturing highly-regulated medicines. 'The playing field in which life sciences companies operate is getting ever harder,' explains Simon Logghe, life sciences industry lead at ML6. 'Typically, to develop a drug, test it and bring it to market can easily take more than 15 years for a pharmaceutical company. With patents only lasting 20 years, there's a small margin to win the investment back. A lot of drugs don't even get into the commercial phase as they don't get through the clinical trial period.

It looks and feels like a real person. It can cough, has a gag reflex and even cry "ouch!" if handled roughly. Meet mikoto, a next-generation medical simulation robot developed for students, young doctors and emergency care workers so they can get hands-on training without the risk of harming actual patients. Medical venture Tmsuk R&D Inc. and Tottori University Hospital, both based in Yonago, Tottori Prefecture, have jointly developed mikoto, the name of which means "life." The mannequin-like robot is specifically designed for three tasks: endotracheal intubation (an emergency procedure whereby a patient's airway is opened by inserting a tube into the windpipe through the mouth or nose); gastrointestinal endoscopy (checking the stomach and other internal organs via a flexible fiber-optic tube with a tiny TV camera attached to its end); and sputum suctioning.