The Gutenberg press disseminated ideas to a wider society. But in the clinical world, much information is still on "lockdown." (Wikimedia Commons)
The best things in life are free: friends, sunny days, beautiful vistas. Wouldn’t it be nice if knowledge were also free? Historically, libraries promulgated knowledge sharing because it was for the public good. We see this spirit increasingly embraced on the Internet – take the recent announcement of a collaboration between Harvard and MIT to make their courses freely available to users around the world via the edX platform.
But have we made all useful knowledge available in a way that allows for the greatest societal advancement? Not really. According to Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, director of the Intelligent Health Laboratory at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), one important source of information still on lockdown is clinical trial data. In an article called, “Learning from Hackers: Open-Source Clinical Trials” published this month in Science Translational Medicine (not currently available in full text), Mandl and his coauthors call for making raw, de-identified clinical trial data free to the public. Full story »
Surgeons and dentists often use Gelfoam sponges to mop up blood and help stop bleeding. Could they act as drug-eluting devices to grow new heart tissue?
While current heart-attack treatments mainly try to preserve healthy heart tissue, scientists have been finding ways to stimulate growth of new tissue to replace the tissue that’s damaged. They’ve done this either by getting heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) to make more copies of themselves, or by stimulating other cells to become cardiomyocytes (one recently reported study, for example, used genetic regulators called microRNAs).
The next challenge lies in getting these regenerative factors into a living patient’s damaged heart tissue — without affecting healthy tissue – and getting the factors to stay in place long enough to work their magic.
A new approach developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, which could be used relatively soon, takes advantage of Gelfoam, a gelatin-based sponge that’s already FDA-approved and has been used by surgeons and dentists for decades. Full story »
This comfy wristband can sound an alarm when a child is having a seizure, and can help doctors better time medication dosing.
This is the first post in a series about new approaches for seizures and epilepsy.
Seizures are often hard to track in children with epilepsy, making it difficult for doctors to optimize their treatment. For parents, the greatest worry is that their child will have a life-threatening seizure in the middle of the night or away from home, unable to get help. And what about when that child goes off to college?
“Every parent asks, ‘What can I do to prevent my child from harm?’” says Tobias Loddenkemper, MD, a neurologist in the Epilepsy Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Loddenkemper also wanted to better understand his patients’ seizure patterns so he could better time the dosing of their medications. He’s been testing a wristband sensor system, developed by Rosalind Picard, ScD, and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab (Epilepsia, March 20), and thinks it could be part of the solution. Full story »
Margaret Coughlin is a Senior Vice President and the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Here at the TEDMED conference, it’s all about horizontal or lateral thinking – coming at problems from new directions, without regard to conventional boundaries. I like the thoughts of Edward DeBono (not a TEDMED speaker), who coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967:
Some people are unhappy about lateral thinking because they feel it threatens the validity of vertical thinking. This is not so at all. The two processes are complementary, not antagonistic. Lateral thinking enhances the effectiveness of vertical thinking by offering it more to select from. Vertical thinking multiplies the effectiveness of lateral thinking by making good use of the ideas generated.
Lateral thinking is, in a way, an antidote to the way we’re all taught—vertically and specifically. Our education systems seem to be getting more vertical – more concerned with meeting prescribed benchmarks, and, in so doing, discarding the creativity and imagination of learning that is critical to real innovation and real forward movement. As for medical education, radiation oncologist and TEDMED speaker Jacob Scott said it has replaced creativity in the brain with a warehouse. Full story »
When children return home from the hospital after surgery, parents can be overwhelmed by the written information and instructions for follow-up. At the MIT Media Lab’s Health and Wellness Hackathon earlier this year, the focus was on empowering patients to take an active role in their health. As my colleague Brian Rosman described, our team from Boston Children’s Hospital attended and spent two weeks developing “Ralph,” a mobile application for managing post-operative care that incorporates an avatar and features of gaming to engage and motivate children to follow their regimen. I was one of the primary programmers for our group.
We won third place, working alongside five other talented teams. Here are some snapshots of what they were up to — helping patients manage asthma, diabetes, pain, cardiac rehab and more. Full story »
Researchers and doctors dream of being able to artificially produce platelets (in the blood bag above) at clinically useful scales. A device that mimics the environments in which platelets mature could help them get there. (Toytoy/Wikimedia Commons)
The platelet – a crucial cog in our blood’s clotting machinery – is in high demand. Trauma, chemotherapy, and surgery patients often need platelet transfusions to keep their blood working properly. So too do people with genetic disorders like Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome that prevent them from producing enough platelets on their own and cause thrombocytopenia.
However, platelets are in short supply compared to other blood products, in part due to their short shelf life.
“Platelets only last in the body for about 10 days at a time,” explains Jonathan Thon, a fellow in the laboratory of Joe Italiano, a member of Children’s Vascular Biology Program. “In a blood bank, red blood cells can be stored in a refrigerator for 42 days, and plasma can be frozen for years. But platelets need to be stored at room temperature, and only for a short time for fear of bacterial contamination.” Which means that few platelets are available for those who need them – a situation that screams for a means of artificial platelet production. Full story »
When I entered the MIT Health and Wellness Innovation “hackathon,” it wasn’t with high hopes. I felt our team from Children’s Hospital Boston had a solid idea to develop, but I’d taken part in similar collaborations that fell victim to personal disputes, group member apathy and overzealous leadership. This time I was wrong.
Here’s a snapshot of the 10-day event/competition, sponsored by MIT Media Lab, and the digital health projects that came out of it. The idea for our project — a mobile telecommunication robot that could monitor children in their homes after surgery — originated with Bob Nguyen, a urologist at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Our mobile robot, the VGo, has the potential to be a great tool, but when we’re not using it to make remote visits, it just takes up space in the patient’s house.
Dr. Nguyen felt the robot could be enhanced if the family could interact with it to ask questions, through some type of artificial intelligence, while the child played with some kind of game or character that would help them stay on their post-operative regimen. Full story »
Children's Hospital Boston's first Innovation Day Feb 14, 2012
On Tuesday, Children’s Hospital Boston featured its first Innovation Day. Organized by the Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program, which seeks to promote grass roots innovation within the hospital, the TEDMED style conference featured talks by 17 of the Hospital’s clinicians. Our Chief Innovation Officer Naomi Fried welcomed a packed house, which included attendees from across the country. Here we’re featuring some of the technologies that were revealed on Tuesday and how they’re changing the face of pediatric medicine: Full story »
Even a small idea, given a small boost, can have a high impact. (Rick Kimpel/Flickr)
When I tell people I work at the Technology and Innovation Development Office at Children’s (TIDO), they usually think I work to commercialize patented blockbuster drug candidates. But many of the most satisfying projects I help promote are innovations that don’t involve as much risk, time and investment, yet make a big difference for patients. Commercializing these innovations can help the greater good, and is part of what propels me to work at a licensing office at a pediatric hospital.
And sometimes it doesn’t take much to help them along.
The Sonnewheel Body Mass Index Calculator and the Vidatak communications board for patients unable to speak or write are some products supported by TIDO without income being the primary goal. Another great example, which we blogged about recently, is helping make routine blood draws less stressful for kids with learning differences and their parents.
Valentine's Day is Innovation Day (image: Richard Giles/Flickr)
In a series of 17 short TED-style talks next Tuesday, February 14, clinicians and scientists from Children’s will present new products, processes and technologies to make health care safer, better and less expensive. The event, from 1-5 p.m. Eastern, is sponsored by the Innovation Acceleration Program. It’s now running a wait list, but you can also watch the live stream or track the proceedings on Twitter (#iDay) or via @science4care. Here’s a small sampling of next week’s presenters; for details, read the press release or view the full agenda.
Diagnosing lazy eye when it’s most treatable: in preschoolers
If lazy eye, or amblyopia, is caught early – ideally, before age 5 – it’s easily treated by patching the “good” eye, forcing the child to use and strengthen the weaker eye. But if it goes unnoticed, the weak, unused eye can slowly go blind, Full story »
