1 . When patients are discharged (出院) from the hospital, effective summaries from doctors’ notes are essential to capture their health status in the medical record. Whereas, most are filled with technical languages that are hard to understand and increase patients’ anxiety.

To address the problem, researchers from New York University (NYU) Langone Health have been testing the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI). It tries to develop likely options for the next word in any sentence based on how most people use words in context on the Internet.

NYU Langone Health received access to the latest tool from a famous tech company to explore generative AI. One of the studies by the researchers published in JAMA Network Open, looked at how well the tool could convert (转换) the text in 50 patient discharge notes into patient-friendly language. Specifically, generative AI made the discharge notes drop from 11th-grade reading level on average to a 6th-grade level.

Two physicians were asked to review the AI discharge summary based on a 6th-grade level. The reviewing physicians awarded 54 percent of the AI-generated discharge notes the best-possible accuracy rating. They also found that 56 percent of notes created by AI were entirely complete. The result signified that even at the current performance level, providers of discharge notes would not have to make a single change in more than half of the AI summaries reviewed.

“That more than half of the AI reports generated are accurate and complete is an amazing start,” said Jonah Zaretsky, associate chief of medicine at NYU Langone Hospital — Brooklyn. “Even at the current level of performance, which we expect to improve shortly, the achievement of the AI tool suggests that it can be taught to recognize subtleties (微妙之处).”

Within the following years, the team expects to launch a pilot program to provide lay language discharge summaries that have been generated by AI and reviewed by physicians to patients on a larger scale.

3 . Very few people enjoy going to the dentist, especially for a filling. Often fillings need to be replaced during the patient’s lifetime. But is filling the cavity (蛀牙洞) with a foreign material really the best treatment? Is it possible that the tooth could repair itself with its own material — dentine (牙质)? Researchers at King’s College London have found a process that may replace the traditional method.

Paul Sharpe of King’s College London says the new treatment for cavities is simpler. It uses a drug that causes the tooth to fill in the hole naturally with dentine. “It involves putting a drug in the hole. It excites a natural process, which starts to occur anyway following the damage, so you can actually get the big hole repaired and the repair is the production of the natural material, the dentine.”

Usually a new drug requires repeated testing before it is approved for treatment. However, this drug that produces the regrowth material in teeth has already been approved. It is a drug used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders of the nervous system. Researchers explain that they use only a small amount and they use it locally. Usually that means the medicine is put directly on the affected area. It does not travel through the patient’s blood.

Nigel Carter heads Britain’s Oral Health Foundation. He describes the new treatment as an exciting possibility for dental care. But Carter also has a warning, “Actually regrowing the tooth that has been lost with a cavity would be really a huge step forward. But it's also important that we remember that filling the cavity is not the first place. It’s a preventable disease.”

5 . PRACTITIONERS

7 . Professors at the University of California San Diego have developed microrobots, which can be a potential treatment for life-threatening cases of bacterial pneumonia, a serious disease affecting lungs and making breathing difficult. In mice, the microrobots safely removed pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs and resulted in 100% survival while untreated mice all died within three days after infection.

The microrobots are made of algae (藻类) cells whose surfaces are covered with substances that are filled with antibiotics (抗生素). The algae provides movement, which allows the microrobots to swim around and make antibiotics go directly to more bacteria in the lungs, helping absorb bacteria and clear them of infected cells. This give the microrobots the ability to reduce bacterial infection, which in turn makes them more effective at fighting lung infection.

The work is a joint effort by engineering professors Joseph and Zhang Liangfang. Together, they have pioneered the development of tiny drug-delivering robots that can be safely used in live animals to treat bacterial infections in the stomach and blood. Treating bacterial lung infection is the latest in their line of work.

“In the traditional treatment, sometimes only a very small number of antibiotics will get into the lungs. That’s why many current antibiotic treatments for pneumonia don’t work as well as needed,” said Victor Nizet, a co-worker of Joseph and Zhang “Based on these mouse data, we see that the microrobots could potentially improve the use of antibiotics to kill bacteria and save more patients’ lives.”

The work is still at the proof-of-concept stage. The team plans to do more basic research to understand exactly how the microrobots interact with the immune system (免疫系统). Next steps also include studies to confirm the effectiveness of the microrobot treatment before testing it in larger animals and eventually, in humans. “We’re pushing the boundary further in the field of targeted drug delivery,” said Zhang.

One day, I felt terrible pain in different part of my body. When I touched my hand, I felt pain in the hand. When I touched my cheek, my cheek hurts. Wherever I touched, I felt the pain. I found this condition very frightened, so I saw a doctor but explained my strange condition. A doctor examined me and found nothing abnormal. She asked me to get a completely health check-up. All reports were quite normal, what made the doctor rather surprised. Suddenly the doctor realized something and asked myself to touch her hand. I touched her hand and still felt the pain. The doctor finally worked out to what my problem was — my finger injured.

9 . A small implant connected to electrodes (电极) inserted into the skull bone (颅骨) is providing huge relief to younger patients living with Parkinson’s disease, such that it could allow sufferers to pick up fine motor skills like playing golf again.

While it isn’t a cure, the implant is a treatment that makes living with Parkinson’s ten times more bearable. “Before the operation I went for a walk on Boxing Day with my wife and I got 182m from the actual car,” Tony Howells, who received this implant in 2019, said. “Then after the operation, which was 12 months later, I went on Boxing Day again and we went as far as 4km and could have gone further. It was amazing,” he added.

25 patients like Howells have been selected to participate in the trial at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, England, which will conclude next year. Most of them are older than 50, but those who may be old enough to begin losing memories are too old for the operation.

The operation involves inserting the tiny battery within the skull bone and running electrodes down into the center of the brain in the subthalamic nuclei (底丘脑核). It then delivers delicate electrical impulses (脉冲) to help stimulate nerve cells to work correctly, thereby restoring some of the normal muscular function which Parkinson’s disturbs.

Previous implanting operations involved batteries implanted into a patient’s chest. This new method takes just three hours, and could be available for as many as 10% of all Parkinson’s patients.

“You can’t understand how upsetting Parkinson’s is until it happens to you. Just doing your shoelaces up is a major operation... it affects your everyday life no end,” said Howells, who is even able to play fine-tuned sports-including golf-again.