New MIT Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES)

I miss being a student at MIT. Those were definitely some of the best days of my life. Recently, MIT launched their Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES). Although HST was there when I was a student, IMES simply didn't exist.

The Institute for Medical Engineering and Science pioneers novel research and graduate education paradigms to advance health and educate leaders working at the convergence of engineering, science, and clinical medicine. IMES brings together MIT’s strengths in engineering, basic science, innovation, and entrepreneurship with clinical practice and research through its strategic partnerships with collaborating Boston area hospitals and biotech and medical device companies.

Based at IMES, the Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (MEDRC) aims to develop disruptive medical device technologies and is supported by a consortium of companies.

Through the Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology Program (HST), students can also pursue degrees in the following programs:

• Biomedical Enterprise Program (BEP)
• Master of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering (MEBE)
• Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP)

You can learn more about the MIT IMES program here.

EmTech: The MIT Conference on Emerging Technologies

If you're looking for a reason to visit MIT this fall, EmTech MIT is where technology, business, and culture converge. It’s the showcase for emerging technologies with the greatest potential to change our lives. It’s an access point to the most innovative people and companies in the world. Most of all, it is a place of inspiration—an opportunity to glimpse the future and begin to understand the technologies that matter and how they’ll change the face of business and drive the new global economy.

EmTech
MIT Media Lab
Oct 9-11, 2013
Cambridge, MA

Learn more here: http://www2.technologyreview.com/emtech/13/

My photo with George Takei in NYC (taken by @KentBottles)

I was in NYC over the weekend attending the 2013 ACPE conference and I was having lunch with Kent Bottles at McCormick & Schmick's. Before I realized it, I saw Star Trek's George Takei having lunch right next to us! So, I patiently waited until he was finished with his lunch and then I did what any other MIT alum would do. I got a photo with him and sent it via Twitter. (special thanks to Kent Bottles for taking the photo). There's just something about MIT and Star Trek.

The new Star Trek movie is coming out in a few weeks and I'm sure we'll see some interesting futuristic medical concepts that go beyond the tricorder.

MIT professor studying the mechanics of metastasis

Professor Roger Kamm at MIT was my advisor when I was a mechanical engineering student at MIT.

Roger Kamm, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering, and his doctoral student Ioannis Zervantonakis are studying the mechanics of metastasis. They are using a 3-D microfluidic device developed in his lab, including a recent study on the effect of flow on tumor-cell migration.

Read more here.

Happy Pi Day 3.14

Today is Pi Day. The unofficial holiday at MIT. Today, MIT also announces who has been admitted to the class of 2017. You will see some high school students announcing their acceptance to MIT today on Twitter.

Have you memorized Pi? 3.14159

Next year (2015), we're going to celebrate pi to 3.1415! I think the entire geek community will go haywire that day and they won't be able to contain themselves.

Technology innovation and health care quality #mHS12

This morning, we also had several presentations focused around technology innovations and health care quality.

Harry Greenspun from Deloitte spoke about our perceptions around health care quality. As always, he was engaging and entertaining as he spoke about the importance of understanding health care ratings on doctors and hospitals. Most patients are not able to rate their doctors about the quality of their providers. They can provide feedback related to customer service, but not necessarily about health outcomes that are measured based on national quality standards. Physician information listed on physician-rating websites is often not accurate. This is true for Harry. It's actually also true for me and many other physicians I personally know. Also, as we develop mHealth innovations that are based on social interactions online, we must be mindful of patient privacy. After all, some patients are very open about their health conditions, but most want their information secured and private.

The next session this morning was titled, "Pushing the Limits of Mobile Health – Can we have Health & Healthcare Without Doctors?" Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures spoke about the evolving role of computers in health care, especially around medical diagnosis. Will doctors get replaced by computers? The discussed the "man vs. machine" debate as it relates to computerized algorithms designed to diagnose diseases. When you consider all the data we get from genomics and proteomics.

Then, Joseph Kvedar, Director of the Center for Connected Health, spoke about the automation of health care from his perspective as a physician. We don't have enough health care providers to manage the global health care burden. So, what types of automated care will we see? He spoke about the IBM Watson at medical algorithmic tasks. He also described an artificial intelligence engine that has a cartoon-based interface for discharge planning. This system interacts with patients and reviews the discharge instructions. His last example was GeriJoy, a digital pet that lives in your tablet and interacts with older patients. Since health care is driven by repetitive, algorithmic tasks, we'll probably find more robots and computers providing some elements of health care in the future.

2012 mHealth Summit Coverage

The 2012 mHealth Summit coverage on Medicine and Technology.com is sponsored by HP. HP’s extensive portfolio of products, solutions, services and relationships can help your healthcare organization achieve quality business practices and provide quality patient care. Follow HP Healthcare on Twitter @HPHealthcare.

MIT researchers developing a way to overcome disambiguation in physician notes

When busy doctors are jotting down or dictating patient notes, they may use the same word to mean different things. A common example is the term "discharge." Do we mean discharging a patient from a hospital or a bodily discharge of fluid?

Word-sense disambiguation remains a significant challenge when we try to mine electronic patient notes written by health care professionals.

MIT researchers are exploring ways to overcome this barrier. Read more at MIT News and stay tuned as this team prepares to present their work at the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) annual symposium next week.

Advances in transdermal (needle-free) drug delivery

It's exciting to see what the researchers at MIT are discovering in the area of transdermal (needle-free) drug delivery. Wouldn't it be great if we never had to rely on needles to deliver medications?

Using ultrasound waves, MIT engineers have found a way to enhance the permeability of the skin to drugs, making transdermal drug delivery more efficient. This technology could pave the way for noninvasive drug delivery or needle-free vaccinations, according to the researchers.



Read more at MIT News

Hackers at MIT playing Tetris on the Green Building

Back when I was at MIT, students used to pull hacks (practical pranks) all the time. They set a police car on the dome of MIT in 1994. They dressed the dome up to be R2-D2 from Star Wars in 1999. Now, they are playing Tetris (in color) on the Green Building.

Hacking Medicine at MIT

There are many days when I wish I could be back in Boston. There is a very interesting movement at MIT called "Hacking Medicine at MIT" and they have an event coming up on April 10th with the Chief Administrative Officer from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

The time is right to hack healthcare, but as entrepreneurs we often are setback because we can’t get to the people that are making the decisions in healthcare settings, government, and industry. To help fix this, Bob Higgins, Richard Foster, Jim Dougherty and Hacking Medicine have teamed up to bring you Eric Buehrens, the former Chief Administrative Officer from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), one of the largest and most prestigious academic medical centers in the world. If you ever want to sell or partner with a hospital, Eric is the ideal person to speak to because he is the one who makes the decisions at the top. Prior to his current role, he served as Interim President and Chief Executive Officer of BIDMC. The goal of this event is to help connect entrepreneurs to the marketplace and give you open access to Eric Buehrens and ask him those questions you can’t find the answer to on any website.

Open Mic Session with Eric Buehrens, Chief Administrative Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Date: Tuesday, April 10th
Time: 7 – 9PM
Location: Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, One Amherst Street, E40-160, Cambridge, MA

About Hacking Medicine:
Hacking Medicine’s mission is to create an ecosystem at MIT and beyond for the Boston medical community, tech entrepreneurs and clinicians to arm them with the skills necessary to launch disruptive healthcare businesses. For more information, visit: http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/.

Happy Pi Day (3.14) and Congrats to the new MIT class of 2016!

Today is Pi Day (3.14) and it is also the day when MIT announces the new class of 2016. Congratulations to all the students who got accepted to MIT!

MIT Sloan 2012 Healthcare Case Competition

I really wish I could be back up in Boston to participate in the upcoming MIT Sloan 2012 Healthcare Case Competition. Good luck to all the teams!

Digital Marketing for Healthcare
A real opportunity to embrace the future

Saturday, February 25, 2012

TIMELINE
February 9 - Applications due at 9pm
February 16 - Notify selected teams by email
February 17 - Release AVEO case to selected teams
February 24 - Presentations due at 9pm
February 25 - Presentations and Awards Ceremony (9am-4pm)

PRIZE
$4000 and $1600 cash prizes will be distributed to the first and second place teams.
All participants are invited to attend MIT Sloan BioInnovations Conference February 24, 2012

APPLICATIONS
Team Applications are due by 9pm February 9, 2012!

More information can be found here.

Hope to see you at the 2011 Connected Health Symposium in Boston #CHS11

I'm getting very excited to attend the 2011 Connected Health Symposium (Oct 20-21 in Boston).

I'll be speaking on a panel discussion on Tuesday: Expert panel #5: Facebooking Health: Scouting Out the Latest Trends in Online Patient Communities and Social Media (Plaza)

Moderator: Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, Assistant Professor, Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine
- John Brownstein, PhD, Research Faculty, Children's Hospital Boston; Director, Computational Epidemiology Group, Informatics Program, Children's Hospital Boston
- Chris Cartter, General Manager, MeYou Health
- Tara Cousineau, PhD, Founder and CEO, BodiMojo
- Joseph Kim, MD, President, Medical Communications Media; Founder and Editor of MedicalSmartphones.com

I really look forward to being back in Boston. I'll be back to MIT to see how it's changed over the years. Maybe I'll go running along the Esplanade.

Follow the Twitter hashtag #CHS11 to see all the tweets from the 2011 Connected Health Symposium.

Pfizer signs deal with MIT

Pfizer Inc. (PFE) Signs Lease with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for Research Space; 400 R&D Jobs to be Created

Giant drug maker Pfizer Inc. said it has signed a 10-year lease with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to locate several research units in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge. Pfizer is now looking to bring 400 new research jobs to Cambridge, up from an earlier estimate of 350. Plans call for the company to relocate research units specializing in neuroscience and in cardiovascular, metabolic, and endocrine diseases to a new building under development at 610 Main St. South. The lease with MIT is for more than 180,000 square feet of space. Construction on that building is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2013.

Read more here.

MIT researchers developing technology that could "cure nearly any viral infection"

Wow, did you see this article from MIT News?

New drug could cure nearly any viral infection
Researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab have developed technology that may someday cure the common cold, influenza and other ailments.

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

Todd Rider invented the PANACEA and DRACO antiviral therapeutics, and previously invented the CANARY (Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields) sensor for rapid pathogen detection and identification.

You can read the story here at MIT News.

Funny t-shirt (nerdy, but fits MIT and Star Trek humor)

I was on the train the other day and I saw a funny t-shirt that said:

Resistance is futile
(if < 1 ohm)

Now, you need to understand a few things to get the humor on this shirt.

First, the phrase "resistance is futile" is from Star Trek. The Borg are a fictional pseudo-race of cybernetic organisms depicted in the Star Trek universe. The Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against which "resistance is futile".

Next, the < 1 ohm is physics. The ohm (symbol: Ω) is the SI unit of electrical resistance, named after Georg Simon Ohm. The ohm is defined as a resistance between two points of a conductor when a constant potential difference of 1 volt, applied to these points, produces in the conductor a current of 1 ampere, the conductor not being the seat of any electromotive force.

Now, I'm not entirely sure if this shirt is scientifically accurate, but it caused me to chuckle and smile as I thought about my college days at MIT. My wife and I had some really nerdy t-shirts that were full of mathematical equations and formulas. We now have baby t-shirts that say "QT pi <pi symbol>"

You can get this shirt from ThinkGeek. Why do I get a feeling that my kids will buy future Father's Day gifts from ThinkGeek?

@PatientsLikeMe helping patients find clinical trials

PatientsLikeMe was co-founded in 2004 by three MIT engineers: brothers Benjamin and James Heywood and longtime friend Jeff Cole. Who knew that mechanical engineering graduates from MIT would be doing something like this? (then again, I also studied mechanical engineering at MIT and look at me now).

They recently announced this:

PATIENTSLIKEME LAUNCHES NEW FEATURE FOR PATIENTS TO ACCELERATE CLINICAL TRIAL ENROLLMENT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — June 09, 2011 — Today, PatientsLikeMe announces the launch of a new feature that helps patients find clinical trials that are right for them and helps companies find patients who are right for their trial. The feature, which updates daily with all of the trial information listed on ClinicalTrial.gov, will automatically match up members of the website with every clinical trial they may be eligible for based on their conditions and location.

“It’s difficult for patients to find trials and for investigators to find patients,” says Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. “We can help solve both of those problems by telling each of our 100,000+ patients what trials they’re eligible for and by showing each trial sponsor how many patients they can reach.”

Reflections on Major Milestones in Cancer Research and Technology Development

From MIT World:

The breadth and depth of thinking represented in MIT’s 150th anniversary symposia would do William Barton Rogers proud, believes David Mindell. MIT’s founder and first president envisioned the university pursuing cutting edge work, and the “convergence of science and engineering 150 years later captures the essence, the special courage” that Rogers imagined, says Mindell.

Personalized Cancer Care

From MIT World

In the final of four symposia on pathbreaking cancer research, Tyler Jacks expresses “great optimism that we’re getting close, that we can see over the horizon...and we will be successful in controlling the disease in the not too distant future.” Personalized medicine will pave the way to this future, explains moderator Michael Yaffe. Scientists must gain an understanding “of what makes each tumor unique, and design a custom strategy to try to turn that knowledge into a cure,” he says. Yaffe’s panelists describe the great challenges involved in generating “the right drug, for the right time, in a dose that maximizes the chances of killing the tumor without killing the patient.”

MIT Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (MEDRC)

I wish this had happened when I was a student at MIT:

MIT collaborates with Analog Devices and GE Global Research
New research center will develop innovative medical technologies for next-generation medical electronic systems

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the creation of the Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (MEDRC), in collaboration with Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) and GE Global Research. The new center will aim to create revolutionary improvements in multiple areas of the medical industry, including electronic devices, diagnostics and treatments, and technologies to enable information-driven health-care systems.

“A radical change is taking place in how medical care is being delivered, with delivery moving to ‘point of care’ rather than having patients travel to a doctor’s office or hospital,” said Charles Sodini, LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT and co-founder of MEDRC. “MEDRC will develop technologies for patient-monitoring devices, point-of-care instruments and the communication technology to connect patients to caregivers. These technologies will enable affordable and accessible delivery of services to patients across the globe.”