The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has been providing the medical field with information since 1836. Starting off as a small collection of books, the entity has grown into the world’s largest biomedical library, housing biomedical research and computational health data research. NLM supports two research programs, the Division of Extramural Programs (EP) and Intramural Research Program (IRP), that seek to catalyze advancements in the intersection of medicine and computer science. Specifically, these programs focus on biomedical informatics, data science, computational biology, and computational health. Through these programs NLM is making major investments in finding new ways that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used in the medical field.  A couple […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its fifth segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are engaging in a very exciting interdisciplinary activity between computer science and medicine. Professor Eftychios Sifakis, collaborating with Dr. Court Cutting and Dr. Timothy King, has built a computer aided platform that allows surgeons in training to rehearse, plan, and experiment with surgical procedures before actually trying them out on a real patient. The research program is called the Skin Biophysics Surgical Simulator and is funded by the National Science Foundation‘s Smart and Connected Health initiative. My vision is that this product is going to improve the quality of patient care by offering the […]

The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  I had the opportunity to attend President Obama’s White House announcement of his “Precision Medicine Initiative” last Friday. The president was introduced by Elana Simon, a computer science major at Harvard University, who has conducted cancer research and was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer as a teenager. Obama’s $215 million request, included in his fiscal 2016 budget, would go toward research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and the […]