news/AAPL/2023.01.19/Health Rounds: AI speeds MRI exams.txt

(Health Rounds is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Think
your friend or colleague should know about us? Forward this
newsletter to them. They can also subscribe here.)Jan 19 - Hello Health Rounds Readers! Today we report on
two studies of potential applications for artificial
intelligence in medicine: MRI scanning, and smart watch
identification of heart rhythm problems. We also share early
data to suggest that plant-based therapy may be helpful for some
patients with ulcerative colitis, a debilitating
gastrointestinal disease.Artificial intelligence gets MRI done fasterArtificial intelligence (AI) allows magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scans to be done faster with no less accuracy,
according to researchers who hope to reduce examination costs
and allow more patients to get the tests.MRI exams can take a long time to perform because the
machines take hundreds of images of body parts in "slices" and
then compile the slices into three-dimensional representations
for doctors to analyze.At NYU Langone Health in New York City, doctors and
scientists collaborated with Meta AI Research to make
the machines scan body parts faster, but at the cost of
collecting only a fourth of the usual amount of data. They then
used AI to "fill in" the missing data, similar to the way the
brain fills in missing information using local context and
previous experiences.For a study reported on Tuesday in Radiology, 170 patients
underwent MRI of the knee in the usual way, which took an
average of roughly 10 minutes, and in an accelerated AI protocol
that took slightly over five minutes. More complex MRI exams can
take 30 minutes or longer.The radiologists judged the AI-reconstructed images to be
just as good as conventional images for detecting problems in
patients' knees and found the overall image quality of the
faster scans to be significantly better than the conventional
images.Important next steps, the researchers said, include
confirming that radiologists' interpretation of the faster scans
correlates with what surgeons later find in the body, and
testing the software on different manufacturers' MRI machines.Smart watch ECGs still no match for doctorsSmart devices hold promise for identifying a common heart
rhythm abnormality but their algorithms still need improvement,
a new study found.Researchers assessed the accuracy of five wearable devices
at detecting atrial fibrillation (AF) - an irregular beating of
the heart that can lead to blood clots and strokes - in 201
patients, including 62 with AF.If inconclusive tracings were excluded from the analysis,
accuracy at identifying people with and without AF were
comparable among the devices, at 85% and 75%, respectively, for
the Apple Watch 6, 85% and 75% for the Samsung Galaxy
Watch 3, 58% and 75% for the Withings Scanwatch, 66%
and 79% for the Fitbit Sense, and 79% and 69% for the AliveCor
KardiaMobile.There were significant differences in proportions of
inconclusive readings from the five devices. With the Apple
Watch 6, 18% of readings were uninterpretable by the device's
algorithm, the researchers reported on Wednesday in JACC
Clinical Electrophysiology. For the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 that
figure was 17%, for Withings Scan Watch 24%, 21% for Fitbit
Sense, and for AliveCor KardiaMobile, 26% of the readings were
inconclusive.Cardiologists, however, were able to interpret 99% of the
readings that were labeled as inconclusive by the device
algorithms, the researchers found."Signal quality for manual review is good, but the
algorithms' ability to automatically classify the rhythm is in
need of further improvement to be of medical value in daily
clinical practice," they concluded. At this point, a smart
device result can only be considered a "pretest," they said,
adding that "manual verification by a trained professional is
mandatory."Plant-based therapy may ease ulcerative colitisCurcumin, a component of turmeric, a common spice often
found in curry, may have some benefit for patients with
ulcerative colitis, a small study suggests.Forty-two patients with active ulcerative colitis were
enrolled in the randomized, controlled trial, with two-thirds of
them receiving treatment with a combination of curcumin and the
herbal medicine QingDai for eight weeks and one-third receiving
a placebo. Patients whose disease improved continued with
curcumin alone or placebo for another eight weeks.Symptoms had improved by eight weeks in 85.7% of the
treatment group and 30.7% of the placebo group. In 75% of the
curcumin and QingDai group, doctors also saw evidence of healing
inside the intestines versus 20% for placebo, according to data
presented this week at the Crohn's and Colitis Congress in
Denver.Among patients receiving just curcumin after benefiting by
week 8, 93% still had symptomatic improvement, and 80% were in
remission, at week 16, researchers found.The treatment was associated with changes in gene and
protein activity in patients' intestinal lining that might
explain its benefits, which suggests that induction of those
changes might be a way to treat ulcerative colitis, the
researchers said.Ulcerative colitis affects roughly a million people in the
United States alone, with high prevalence in Europe as well.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs for treating
the disease are costly and include Bristol Myers Squibb's
Zeposia, Johnson & Johnson's Remicade and
Stelara, Abbvie's Humira, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals'
Entyvio.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)