For years, plastic surgeons thought the proportions of a beautiful buttocks should follow the Fibonacci sequence. Now, people are looking for a more Kardashian shape. In the history of gluteal enhancement, Mexico City stands out. It was here, in 1979, that a plastic surgeon, Mario González-Ulloa, first installed a pair of silicone implants designed specifically for the buttocks. The textbook calls González-Ulloa the "grandfather of buttock augmentation." The early 2000s saw a new generation of Mexico City buttock transformation luminaries, notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. Cuenca-Guerra laid out four characteristics that "determine attractive buttocks" as well as the five types of "defects," with strategies for correcting each one. I, for instance, have defect type 5, the "senile buttock." While I understand the value of standardizing procedures and setting guidelines for surgical practice, I tripped over Cuenca-Guerra's methodology. How and by whom had the determinants been determined?

After losing nearly six stone since December with the help of weight-loss injections, Emilly Murray has been left with an unwanted reminder of her former body - loose skin. I can't wear what I want to wear, says the 35-year-old from Liverpool. I cannot get my legs out because the skin hangs over my knee so much. While she doesn't regret losing weight for the benefit of her health, Emilly says the loose skin on her thighs really does get me down as it makes her feel self-conscious, and the way she looks naked makes her feel like a catfish. It looks okay when it's all pulled in, but then I feel like, when I take my clothes off, I look like a 90-year-old woman.

By late 2017, I'd reported on so many cosmetic surgery stories that I started wondering if I should get something done myself. Looking in the mirror, I couldn't pinpoint what procedure would make me look better. So I turned to the now defunct startup Analyze My Face for advice. The startup asked me to take hi-res images of my face using my DSLR, and then uses that picture to consult with dental and cosmetic surgeons to create a mockup of the "best" face for me; apparently I could use fillers due to poor chin projection and Madame Butterfly surgery on my lower eyelids to fill out the hollows. I was impressed at the time, but two years is a long time in tech; today algorithms, not humans, would make this assessment.

You've probably read that artificial intelligence is transforming medicine. While the field has yet to reach its full potential, researchers are exploring ways that machine learning, a subset of AI, can dramatically improve patient outcomes. Machine learning is ultimately about understanding large amounts of data, making it an important tool for handling the flood of electronic data available to health care workers. With the ubiquity of smartphones, image data is more abundant than ever. Computers are often better than humans at identifying patterns, which makes them particularly strong allies in highly visual fields such as plastic and reconstructive surgery, where they can detect, diagnose, monitor, and assess patient outcomes.

For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and researching about the products, trends, and people that make us want to look a certain way. And as research for many of the stories I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, aestheticians, and more trying to answer a simple question--how can I make myself more conventionally attractive? "Beauty is confidence," they'd always say, prefacing the real answer. Inevitably, these experts would eventually tell me that you feel more confident, and thus more beautiful, when you look blemish- and wrinkle-free. Naturally, the problem here is the premise.

An eyeball with whole attached optic nerve of a rat in the lab of Dr. Kia Washington, a plastic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center pioneering the research into whole eye transplants. PITTSBURGH -- Scientists have strived for successful eye transplants for centuries. Early attempts read like the diary of Mary Shelley: implanting a dog's eye into a rat's groin, transplanting a rat's eye onto the neck of another rat, plucking the eye of a sheep from one socket and placing it into the other. But never has a whole-eye transplant been successfully done in a living person. The eye's complex web of muscles, blood vessels, and nerves -- connected directly to the brain -- has doomed past experiments to failure.

It takes years, decades even, for physicians to refine the expertise required to notice details that remain invisible to the untrained. This aptitude, depending on a doctor's specialty, might mark the difference between an oncologist knowing a malignant tumor from a benign cyst. It can help a cardiologist determine the velocity of blood as it flows through a hole in the heart. Or it may tell a reconstructive plastic surgeon whether a severe burn is healing nicely or at risk of infection. None of this is easy unless you know how to see in a certain way.

It takes years, decades even, for physicians to refine the expertise required to notice details that remain invisible to the untrained. This aptitude, depending on a doctor's specialty, might mark the difference between an oncologist knowing a malignant tumor from a benign cyst. It can help a cardiologist determine the velocity of blood as it flows through a hole in the heart. Or it may tell a reconstructive plastic surgeon whether a severe burn is healing nicely or at risk of infection. None of this is easy unless you know how to see in a certain way.

As more and more data is being collected by the country's healthcare system, researchers are exploring the option of using a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), namely machine learning to help improve the quality of medical care and patient outcomes. An overview of some of the ways in which machine learning has the potential to contribute to advancements in plastic surgery were published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery recently. Dr. Jonathan Kanevsky from the McGill University in Montreal and his colleagues wrote, "Machine learning has the potential to become a powerful tool in plastic surgery, allowing surgeons to harness complex clinical data to help guide key clinical decision-making." A few key areas were highlighted, all of which showed how machine learning and "Big Data" would be able to contribute to progress in the fields of reconstructive and plastic surgery. Machine learning analyzes historical data to develop algorithms that are capable of knowledge acquisition.

Every child gets a vision and hearing check in school on a regular basis. Dr. Moshe Fried, an Israeli plastic surgeon, believes an annual skin check is necessary as well, starting in the teens. This is why he agreed to be the medical consultant for Emerald Medical Applications' DermaCompare, a free smartphone app that can detect changes in marks and moles over time. The app alerts the user to changes that ought to be screened for cancer. "The skin is the biggest organ in the body," said Fried.