Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

A Look At Breast Cancer Via NASA

James C. Tilton, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, for some years now has been working on new image enhancement software to help automatically analyze satellite data of the Earth. Hierarchical Segmentation Software (HSEG), as the tool is called, identifies relatively homogeneous areas of an image and highlights them.

Our eyes and brains are pretty good at image analysis, but large dense maps can be quite a challenge. Although originally designed for aerial cartography, the first commercial use of the software came in the form of a mammogram enhancement and analysis system.

The lakes of northern Wisconsin (top) are very much like dense breast tissue (side) to a NASA scientist it turns out, and porting over the code and optimizing it led to the MED-SEG™ system from Bartron Medical Imaging (New Haven, Connecticut). Having received FDA approval, plans are now being made to conduct clinical trials evaluating how MED-SEG can benefit radiologists in cancer diagnosis. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles