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NEWS:
Paging Dr. ChatGPT: How These Penn Researchers Are Using AI to Make Healthcare Better
Note: This article was written by a real person.
If you ask the artificial intelligence text generator called ChatGPT how it can help in medicine, it will answer you. “ChatGPT can be a valuable tool in various medical applications,” before providing a 10-point, and fairly detailed, explanation of its practical uses in health care. (Penn’s David Asch, MD, asked it this exact question.)
But rather than taking ChatGPT’s word for it, some researchers at Penn, like Samiran Mukherjee, MBBS, chief fellow in Gastroenterology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, are studying it.
“I don’t think artificial intelligence technology is going away,” said Mukherjee. “It behooves us to understand both how medical professionals can use it to support their work and how patients may choose to interact with it. I’m excited by the potential of artificial intelligence, and
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Good Dental Care Tied To Better Brain Health
Need more incentive to brush and floss? A new report shows that good dental health is linked to better brain health.
The study, published in Neurology, found that gum disease and tooth loss were associated with shrinking in the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for memory and learning and one of the first areas to be damaged by Alzheimer’s disease. The study was small, involving 172 older men and women who were living in Japan. But the findings build on earlier evidence that gum disease is tied to an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
“Tooth loss and gum disease, which is inflammation of the tissue around the teeth that can cause shrinkage of the gums and loosening of the teeth, are very common, so evaluating a potential link with dementia is incredibly important,” said study author Satoshi Yamaguchi, of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. “O
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Substance Abuse in Pregnancy Doubles Cardiovascular Risk
Pregnant women with a history of substance abuse face a dramatically increased risk of death from heart attack and stroke during childbirth when compared with women without history of substance abuse, a new Smidt Heart Institute study shows.
These findings are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances.
"This telling research shows that substance use during pregnancy doubled cardiovascular events and maternal mortality during delivery," said Martha Gulati, MD, senior and corresponding author of the study and the associate director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute. "Substance abuse also doubled the risk of acute heart failure."
The substances studied in the research included cocaine, opioids, alcohol, amphetamine/methamphetamine, and cannabis. Each substance carried a different a
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Drug Discovery On An Unprecedented Scale
Boosting virtual screening with machine learning allowed for a 10-fold time reductionin the processing of 1.56 billion drug-like molecules. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland teamed up with industry and supercomputers to carry out one of the world’s largest virtual drug screens.
In their efforts to find novel drug molecules, researchers often rely on fast computer-aided screening of large compound libraries to identify agents that can block a drug target. Such a target can, for instance, be an enzyme that enables a bacterium to withstand antibiotics or a virus to infect its host. The size of these collections of small organic molecules has seen a massive surge over the past years. With libraries growing faster than the speed of the computers needed to process them, the screening of a modern billion-scale compound library against only a single drug target can take several
