heart disease
'Superhuman' AI tool spots heart disease in less than 2 seconds
For heart disease, early diagnosis is vital for saving lives. For heart disease, early diagnosis is vital for saving lives. Doctors have developed a "superhuman" AI tool that can spot heart disease in less than two seconds. The groundbreaking technology has been trained on millions of patients and works by extracting more information from a routine electrocardiogram (ECG) than the human eye can typically see. The traditional ECG, which records electrical activity in the heart, including the rate and rhythm, has been a vital medical tool in diagnosing heart attacks and abnormal heart rhythms for a century.
AI can detect heart disease in women using mammograms, study suggests
The study examined 97,364 breast scans from 29,921 women who had an average age of 54. The study examined 97,364 breast scans from 29,921 women who had an average age of 54. Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world's leading - and frequently underdiagnosed - cause of death in women. Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke. Experts said it meant breast screening for cancer could become dual-purpose, helping to flag women with heart disease, and other cardiovascular issues, as well as spotting breast cancer early.
In the AI gold rush, tech firms are embracing 72-hour weeks
The recruitment website is jazzy, awash with pictures of happy young workers, and festooned with upbeat mini-slogans such as insane speed, infinite curiosity and customer obsession. Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch. Each job ad contains a warning: Please don't join if you're not excited about working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC. The website belongs to Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients. The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
Impugan: Learning Conditional Generative Models for Robust Data Imputation
Mahmud, Zalish, Kotal, Anantaa, Piplai, Aritran
Incomplete data are common in real-world applications. Sensors fail, records are inconsistent, and datasets collected from different sources often differ in scale, sampling rate, and quality. These differences create missing values that make it difficult to combine data and build reliable models. Standard imputation methods such as regression models, expectation-maximization, and multiple imputation rely on strong assumptions about linearity and independence. These assumptions rarely hold for complex or heterogeneous data, which can lead to biased or over-smoothed estimates. We propose Impugan, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for imputing missing values and integrating heterogeneous datasets. The model is trained on complete samples to learn how missing variables depend on observed ones. During inference, the generator reconstructs missing entries from available features, and the discriminator enforces realism by distinguishing true from imputed data. This adversarial process allows Impugan to capture nonlinear and multimodal relationships that conventional methods cannot represent. In experiments on benchmark datasets and a multi-source integration task, Impugan achieves up to 82\% lower Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and 70\% lower mutual-information deviation (MI) compared to leading baselines. These results show that adversarially trained generative models provide a scalable and principled approach for imputing and merging incomplete, heterogeneous data. Our model is available at: github.com/zalishmahmud/impuganBigData2025
How Ensemble Learning Balances Accuracy and Overfitting: A Bias-Variance Perspective on Tabular Data
Abstract--Tree-based ensemble methods consistently outperform single models on tabular classification tasks, yet the conditions under which ensembles provide clear advantages--and prevent overfitting despite using high-variance base learners--are not always well understood by practitioners. We study four real-world classification problems (Breast Cancer diagnosis, Heart Disease prediction, Pima Indians Diabetes, and Credit Card Fraud detection) comparing classical single models against nine ensemble methods using five-seed repeated stratified cross-validation with statistical significance testing. Our results reveal three distinct regimes: (i) On nearly linearly separable data (Breast Cancer), well-regularized linear models achieve 97% accuracy with <2% generalization gaps; ensembles match but do not substantially exceed this performance. We systematically quantify dataset complexity through linearity scores, feature correlation, class separability, and noise estimates, explaining why different data regimes favor different model families. Cross-validated train/test accuracy and generalization-gap plots provide simple visual diagnostics for practitioners to assess when ensemble complexity is warranted. Statistical testing confirms that ensemble gains are significant on nonlinear tasks (p < 0.01) but not on near-linear data (p > 0.15). The study provides actionable guidelines for ensemble model selection in high-stakes tabular applications, with full code and reproducible experiments publicly available. A model that almost perfectly fits its training data can still fail badly on new cases. This gap between training performance and real-world behaviour is the essence of overfitting, and it is particularly problematic in domains such as medical diagnosis and financial fraud detection, where mistakes are costly: missed tumours delay treatment, and undetected fraud translates directly into monetary loss.
The quest to find out how our bodies react to extreme temperatures
Scientists hope to prevent deaths from climate change, but heat and cold are more complicated than we thought. Libby Cowgill is an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has wheeled me and my cot into a metal-walled room set to 40 F. A loud fan pummels me from above and siphons the dregs of my body heat through the cot's mesh from below. A large respirator fits snug over my nose and mouth. The device tracks carbon dioxide in my exhales--a proxy for how my metabolism speeds up or slows down throughout the experiment. Eventually Cowgill will remove my respirator to slip a wire-thin metal temperature probe several pointy inches into my nose. Cowgill and a graduate student quietly observe me from the corner of their so-called "climate chamber. Just a few hours earlier I'd sat beside them to observe as another volunteer, a 24-year-old personal trainer, endured the cold. Every few minutes, they measured his skin temperature with a thermal camera, his core temperature with a wireless pill, and his blood pressure and other metrics that hinted at how his body handles extreme cold. He lasted almost an hour without shivering; when my turn comes, I shiver aggressively on the cot for nearly an hour straight. I'm visiting Texas to learn about this experiment on how different bodies respond to extreme climates. I jokingly ask Cowgill as she tapes biosensing devices to my chest and legs. After I exit the cold, she surprises me: "You, believe it or not, were not the worst person we've ever seen." Climate change forces us to reckon with the knotty science of how our bodies interact with the environment. Cowgill is a 40-something anthropologist at the University of Missouri who powerlifts and teaches CrossFit in her spare time. She's small and strong, with dark bangs and geometric tattoos. Since 2022, she's spent the summers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center tending to these uncomfortable experiments. Her team hopes to revamp the science of thermoregulation. While we know in broad strokes how people thermoregulate, the science of keeping warm or cool is mottled with blind spots. "We have the general picture.
Grounding AI Explanations in Experience: A Reflective Cognitive Architecture for Clinical Decision Support
Shao, Zijian, Shen, Haiyang, Liu, Mugeng, Fu, Gecheng, Guo, Yaoqi, Wang, Yanfeng, Ma, Yun
Effective disease prediction in modern healthcare demands the twin goals of high accuracy and transparent, clinically meaningful explanations. Existing machine learning and large language model (LLM) based approaches often struggle to balance these goals. Many models yield accurate but unclear statistical outputs, while others generate fluent but statistically unsupported narratives, often undermining both the validity of the explanation and the predictive accuracy itself. This shortcoming comes from a shallow interaction with the data, preventing the development of a deep, detailed understanding similar to a human expert's. We argue that high accuracy and high-quality explanations are not separate objectives but are mutually reinforcing outcomes of a model that develops a deep, direct understanding of the data. To achieve this, we propose the Reflective Cognitive Architecture (RCA), a novel framework that coordinates multiple LLMs to learn from direct experience. RCA features an iterative rule refinement mechanism that improves its logic from prediction errors and a distribution-aware rules check mechanism that bases its reasoning in the dataset's global statistics. By using predictive accuracy as a signal to drive deeper comprehension, RCA builds a strong internal model of the data. We evaluated RCA on one private and two public datasets against 22 baselines. The results demonstrate that RCA not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness with a relative improvement of up to 40\% over the baseline but, more importantly, leverages this deep understanding to excel in generating explanations that are clear, logical, evidence-based, and balanced, highlighting its potential for creating genuinely trustworthy clinical decision support systems. The code is available at \https://github.com/ssssszj/RCA.
Whole-Genome Sequencing Will Change Pregnancy
At WIRED Health 2025, Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui and the genomics pioneer George Church laid out their view of the future of genetic screening. The world of pregnancy is going to radically change, predicts Noor Siddiqui. "I think that the default way people are going to choose to have kids is via IVF and embryo screening," she said at the WIRED Health summit last week. "There's just a massive amount of risk that you can take off of the table." Siddiqui is the founder and CEO of Orchid, a biotech company that offers whole-genome screening of embryos for IVF.