healthcare technology

Low anterior resection syndrome (LARS) is a common functional disorder that develops after patients with rectal cancer undergo anal preservation surgery. Common approaches to assess the symptoms of patients with LARS are often complex and time-consuming.

Instant messaging/social media has great application potential in LARS follow-up, but has been underdeveloped.

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare data between a novel instant messaging/social media follow-up system and a telephone interview in patients with LARS and to analyze the consistency of the instant messaging/social media platform.

Methods: Patients with R0 resectable rectal cancer who accepted several defecation function visits via the instant messaging/social media platform and agreed to a telephone interview after the operation using the same questionnaire including subjective questions and LARS scores were included. Differences between the 2 methods were analyzed in pairs and the diagnostic consistency of instant messaging/social media was calculated based on telephone interview results.

Conclusions

The instant messaging/social media system provides a promising solution to accommodate the primary follow-up needs of patients with LARS by integrating complex functional follow-up tools into smartphone apps. Although it is currently not a substitute for manual follow-up, it has the potential of becoming a major LARS screening method. However, further research on response rate, information accuracy, and user acceptance is needed before an advanced system can be implemented

Roughly 600,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson’s every year, contributing to the more than 10 million people worldwide already living with the neurodegenerative disease. Early detection can result in significantly better treatment outcomes, but it’s notoriously difficult to test for Parkinson’s.

Tencent and health care firm Medopad have committed to trialing systems that tap artificial intelligence (AI) to improve diagnostic accuracy. They announced a collaboration with the Parkinson’s Center of Excellence at King’s College Hospital in London to develop software that can detect signs of Parkinson’s within minutes. (Currently, motor function assessments take about half an hour.)

This technology can help promote early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, screening, and daily evaluations of key functions.

Medopad’s tech, which uses a smartphone camera to monitor patients’ fine motor movements, is one of several apps and wearables the seven-year-old U.K. startup is actively developing.

It instructs patients to open and close a fist while it measures the amplitude and frequency of their finger movements, which the app converts into a graph for clinicians. The goal is to eventually, with the help of AI, teach the system to calculate a symptom severity score automatically.

Tencent and Medopad are far from the only firms applying AI to health care. Just last week, Google subsidiary DeepMind announced that it would use mammograms from Jikei University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan to refine its AI breast cancer detection algorithms. And last month Nvidia unveiled an AI system that generates synthetic scans of brain cancer

read the original story at https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/08/tencent-partners-with-medopad-to-improve-parkinsons-disease-treatment-with-ai/