Innovations that will revolutionize the future of medicine

5. A MUSICAL MILESTONE

a baby — In most nations, premature births—at or before 37 weeks—have risen in the past 20 years. Leaving the nourishing confines of the womb too early can result in complications and often leads to a stay in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
At University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, music is folded into the care plan for some preemies. But unlike other NICU music programs, this novel project features three specific songs, which babies listen to through special headphones made for tiny, fragile heads. The songs are part of an ongoing study that aims to understand how music affects a preterm newborn’s brain and how well it can recognize melody, tempo, and pitch—skills likely related to language processing.
Developed by neonatologist Petra Huppi, researcher Manuela Filippa, and composer Andreas Vollenweider, the project involves scanning babies’ brains via MRI as they listen and comparing the scans to those of babies who were not exposed to the music. The songs—short and “much simpler than Mozart,” says Huppi—were composed to help the infants fall asleep, wake up, or interact.
Further research will assess the full benefit of this therapy, but early findings are promising. MRI scans reveal improved brain connectivity, and the songs appear to support the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking—key to thriving in a noisy NICU and the world beyond. *—Catherine Zuckerman*

And if we want to collect health data when no one’s wearing a device? Engineers at MIT have modified a WiFi-like box so it can capture vital signs and sleep patterns of several people in the same residence.

As new sensing technologies emerge, they’ll yield more biomedical data and insights—and these can be paired with growing stores of genomic data. In combination, they’ll lead us to new ways to optimize wellness, understand disease, and select the most patient-specific preventives and interventions.

The widening array of digital tools paired with AI analytics almost certainly will boost diagnosticians’ accuracy and speed, improving disease detection at early stages and thus raising the odds of successful treatment or cure. Many likely will be phone-based.

With smartphone otoscopes, parents can look in kids’ ears and share the view with a pediatrician. Apps and sensors can enable a phone to take electrocardiograms to check for dangerous arrhythmias; software and a microphone can equip it to “listen” to a cough and diagnose pneumonia. To improve treatment of hypertension—a leading risk factor associated with early death—sensors now in development would take continuous blood pressure readings (no cuff needed).

6. A PATCH THAT READS DEEP

Some technologies dramatically enhance the accuracy and speed of clinicians’ efforts. Identifying a bacterial or viral infection, and the best drugs to treat it, can mean long waits for blood cultures. But scientists have developed biochips that can do a complete microbial scan in a couple of hours, without culturing—and in the process may identify mutations that make some microbes antibiotic resistant.

The boom in research into the human microbiome—the trillions of bacteria on and in each individual’s body—is encouraging new modes of diagnosis and increasing understanding. Genetic analysis could help unlock the many secrets of the gut microbiome, believed to play a role in the risk and development of obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular disease, and even neurologic conditions.

Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, diagnostic tools can be trained to read tissue samples and radiologic scans. Google researchers fed more than a quarter-million patients’ retinal scans into algorithms that recognize patterns—and the technology “learned” to spot which patterns predict a patient has high blood pressure or is at increased risk for heart attack or stroke. In some comparisons, digital tools produced more accurate analyses than did human pathologists, dermatologists, or radiologists.

Pages: 123456