The following is a special contribution to this blog from the Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University) and Elizabeth Mynatt (Georgia Tech), co-chairs of the Computing Community Consortium’s visioning workshop on health information technology – Computing and Healthcare: New Opportunities and Directions– held last month in Bethesda, Maryland. The committee summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. Computing and Healthcare have been receiving a great deal of attention in recent years. For example the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Healthcare has issued a series of reports, the most recent of which, “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to  Continuously Learning Healthcare in America.” provides a list of recommendations, many […]

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially kicked off its newest Grand Challenge, DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). As we’ve blogged previously, the Grand Challenge calls for “a humanoid robot (with a bias toward bipedal designs) that can be used in rough terrain and for industrial disasters.” DARPA also released a video of Pet-Proto, a humanoid robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics. Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is an example of what the agency envisions for the challenge. Watch Pet-Proto in action, as it navigates obstacles:   More about the challenge from DARPA: The Department of Defense’s strategic plan calls for the Joint Force to conduct humanitarian, disaster relief and related operations.  The plan identifies requirements to extend aid […]

This week, the National Science Foundation issued a solicitation for its new Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program. The program aims to support groundbreaking research leading to a new era of scalable computing. NSF estimates that $15 million in awards will be made in FY 2013 for this program.  As the solicitation notes, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) furnished a white paper earlier this year titled 21st Century Computer Architecture, through which members of the computing research community contributed strategic thinking in this space.  The white paper drew upon a number of earlier efforts, including CCC’s Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR) visioning reports. Here is a synopsis of the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program from the National Science Foundation: Computing […]

Technology and society writer Katie Hafner published an article yesterday on the use of technology as clinical tools in The New York Times: Dr. Alvin Rajkomar was doing rounds with his team at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center when he came upon a puzzling case: a frail, elderly patient with a dangerously low sodium level.   As a third-year resident in internal medicine, Dr. Rajkomar was the senior member of the team, and the others looked to him for guidance. An infusion of saline was the answer, but the tricky part lay in the details. Concentration? Volume? Improper treatment could lead to brain swelling, seizures or even death.   Dr. Rajkomar had been on […]

GNS Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company and Aetna, an American managed health care organization, are collaborating to make use of GNS’ supercomputer “REFS” (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation). By using predictive analytics with Aetna claims and other health information, the REFS platform will create data models to help the early identification of metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. To see how REFS works with data and creating models, watch the video below: Read more about the collaboration from the GNS Healthcare press release below:

A couple weeks ago, we featured the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) release of a new landmark study titled Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. One of the recommendations in the report is “to accelerate integration of the best clinical knowledge into care decisions.” IBM’s Watson, the supercomputing system that topped the world’s best human players at Jeopardy! last spring, is one example of leveraging advances in computer science to accelerate knowledge into healthcare decisions. As we’ve noted here previously, not only can Watson operate at the speed of 80 teraflops, but it can also over time learn which algorithms to run in which situations. The obvious example of […]