3 Exciting things happening in medicine right now

Scientists restore key parts of vision in blind mice for first time

In Nature Neuroscience, a team led by senior author Andrew Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology who heads a neural vision lab at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, reports unprecedented success in restoring broken links between retinal ganglion cells and various parts of the brain in mice.

The researchers describe how they coaxed optic-nerve cables that carry vision information from the eye to the brain, to regenerate. They found the cables not only repaired themselves, but also re-traced the same routes they had before being severed.

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How to enroll in medicine’s most exciting experiment

The Precision Medicine Initiative announced by President Obama last year generated excitement across the scientific and medical worlds. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to treating health problems and preventing disease, the initiative seeks to usher in a new era of medical effectiveness by calibrating treatment to the individual based on his or her genes, environment and lifestyle

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Artificial intelligence finds cancer cells more efficiently

By using a laser at nanosecond speeds, in combination with deep learning algorithms, a new microscope detects cancer cells more efficiently than standard methods.

The "photonic time stretch" was invented by Professor Barham Jalali, who holds a patent for this technology, and its use in microscopes is just one of many possible applications. It works by taking pictures of flowing blood cells using laser bursts in the way that a camera uses a flash. This process happens so quickly – in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second – that the images would be too weak to be detected and too fast to be digitised by normal instrumentation. The new microscope overcomes those challenges using specially designed optics that boost the clarity of the images and simultaneously slow them enough to be detected and digitised at a rate of 36 million images per second. It then uses deep learning to distinguish the cancer cells from healthy white blood cells. Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence that uses complex algorithms to extract meaning from data, with the goal of achieving accurate decision making.

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