Stories about: Innovation

Predicting influenza outbreaks faster with a digitally-empowered wearable device

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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Influenza viruses. Outbreaks can be predicted using digital health tools like Thermia.The Thermia online health educational tool, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, has enabled one-month-faster prediction of seasonal influenza outbreaks in China, via its digital integration with a commercially-available wearable thermometer. The findings appear in a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

 “The fact that we were able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than China’s national surveillance programs really shows the capacity for everyday, wearable digital health devices to track the spread of disease at the population level,” says the study’s lead author Yulin Hswen, who is a research fellow in Boston Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

China has 620 million mobile internet users who can theoretically access the standalone Thermia application from any computer, smartphone or even the Amazon Alexa assistant.

Although the Boston Children’s team has previously demonstrated that social media can be used to track disease, this is the first time they’ve shown that outbreaks can be predicted through an integrated wearable device and online tool. …

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Preparing patients and families to manage ventricular assist devices

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation, People
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Beth Hawkins ventricular assist devices

Children in severe heart failure sometimes have a ventricular assist device (VAD) implanted in their chest. VADs are electrically-powered heart pumps that can tide children over while they wait for a heart transplant. They can also be implanted long term if a child is ineligible for transplant, or simply buy children time to recover their own heart function.

Because problems with VADs can be life-threatening, families need extensive training in managing the device and its external controller at home. Nurse practitioner Beth Hawkins RN, MSN, FNP-C, and her colleagues in the Boston Children’s VAD Program begin the training at the child’s hospital bedside while they are still in the cardiac ICU. But despite lectures, demos and practice opportunities, the prospect of maintaining a VAD remains terrifying for many parents and children.

“A lot of families feel their child is attached to a ticking time bomb that could go off at any time,” says Hawkins. “Many say taking a child home on a VAD feels like having a newborn baby again.”

Hawkins realized that families needed more support. …

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Protein science 2.0: Amping up antibodies

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Innovation, Market trends, Science, Therapeutics
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Institute for Protein Innovation antibody libraries
The Institute for Protein Innovation, launching next week with $15 million in grants and philanthropy, aims to develop comprehensive, open-source libraries of antibodies targeting human proteins.

It began with the proteins. Before Watson and Crick unraveled DNA’s double helix in the 1950s, biochemists snipped, ground and pulverized animal tissues to extract and study proteins, the workhorses of the body.

Then, in 1990, the Human Genome Project launched. It promised to uncover the underpinnings of all human biology and the keys to treating disease. Funding for DNA and RNA tools and studies skyrocketed. Meanwhile, protein science fell behind.

While genomics unveiled a wealth of information, including the identity of genes that lead to disease when mutated, researchers still do not fully understand what all the genes really do and how mutations change their function and cause disease.

Now proteins are promising to provide the missing link. …

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#TBT: How hyperbaric heart surgery saved infants’ lives in the 1960s

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Innovation, Science
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Boston Children’s surgical team entering the hyperbaric chamber, loaned from Harvard School of Public Health.
Boston Globe clipping about hyperbaric chamber
From the Boston Sunday Globe, Feb. 10, 1963.

In 1962, the Harvard School of Public Health made a critical loan to Boston Children’s Hospital: the Harvard hyperbaric chamber. It established a new approach to pediatric heart surgery at Boston Children’s.

For many children — including a premature infant named Janet, born in 1964 with a heart murmur — the hyperbaric chamber would prove to be life-saving.

At that time, before the invention of the heart-lung bypass machine, hyperbaric chambers offered a way to operate on infants more safely. That’s because hyperbaric oxygenation, coupled with the effects of increased pressure on the respiratory system, seemed to give infants a better chance of surviving heart surgery. …

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GALLERY: Custom-built ‘trainers’ help clinicians master procedures

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation
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medical mannequins manikins trainers medical simulation
Andrew Hosmer (left) and Noah Schulz at the bench, building parts for medical trainers.

Walking into the SIMPeds Engineering Studio, a few blocks from Boston Children’s Hospital, the first thing you notice is body parts — high-fidelity replicas of human anatomy in various sizes. Some are in a glass display case, while others are laid out in various states of assembly, from a lone finger to the complete abdominal cavity of a newborn, packed with diminutive organs. Six newborn-sized, hollow duodenums, cast in rubber over a plastic mold, hang ready near a workbench.

These aren’t your usual medical mannequins.

In the adjoining InventorSpace, three 3D printers stand ready to fabricate additional custom parts. Some will be used by surgeons to rehearse an upcoming complex operation. Others are used for general training and preparedness purposes. …

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Looking between seizures to map seizures’ origins

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, Science
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seizure mapping

When epilepsy can’t be controlled with drugs, neurosurgery is sometimes curative, if the seizures are coming from discrete brain tissue that can be safely removed.

Finding these diseased areas, however, can require invasive surgery to place grids of electrodes on the brain’s surface. That’s followed by long-term, 24-hour EEG monitoring — typically for a week — until a seizure happens. Neurosurgeons then use this data to map a surgical path. But to actually remove the diseased tissue, a second operation is needed.

That’s enough to deter many families from epilepsy surgery. But what if seizure origins could be mapped without having to actually observe a seizure?

Joseph Madsen, MD, director of Epilepsy Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Eun-Hyoung Park, PhD, a computational biophysicist in the Department of Neurosurgery, think they have a way to do that — with an algorithm originally used for economic forecasting.  …

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Lessons from the data: Applying machine learning for clinical decision support

Posted on by Greg Weintraub
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, Market trends
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machine learning clinical decision support

Mauricio Santillana, PhD, faculty member in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, had an idea as he witnessed the volume of continuous real-time data generated in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). He realized that tapping the data on patients’ ever-changing vital signs, with the help of machine-learning algorithms, could support clinical decision-making and predict (and help head off) up-coming health issues.

He started a dialogue with the hospital’s Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator, and now collaborates closely with clinicians in the PICU to create machine-learning algorithms that can help them provide the highest level of care.

“It’s fairly recent that clinicians realized people with backgrounds in math and statistics can be very helpful in a clinical context,” says Santillana.  …

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Science then & now: Progress that you can see

Posted on by Kat J. McAlpine
Posted in Innovation, People, Science
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Click and drag to compare and contrast archive photos from the lab with current-day images of research at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Then, 1986: Stuart H. Orkin, MD, examines the DNA sequence of a gene.

Now, 2017: Today, Orkin is associate chief of Hematology/Oncology and chairman of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (DF/BC). In this photo, he examines a rendering of a gene regulatory molecule’s structure. Orkin’s lab investigates gene regulation of stem cell development, genetic vulnerabilities to cancer and gene and other therapies for treating hemoglobin disorders.  …

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Can virtual reality headsets save vision in people with lazy eye?

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Devices, Innovation, Pediatrics
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Luminopia amblyopia virtual reality
IDHA’s Matt Murphy tries out Luminopia’s VR headset with Dean Travers (photo: Greb Weintraub)

Three to five percent of the population has amblyopia, a.k.a. lazy eye, in which a healthy eye never “learns” to see because isn’t used. This usually happens because of a focusing problem or subtle misalignment of that eye. The brain learns to ignore input from that eye, and unless this is noticed early, it weakens and can slowly go blind.

“When I can diagnose amblyopia early enough, I can treat it with an eye patch or eye drops to block the ‘good’ eye,” says David Hunter, MD, PhD, chief of ophthalmology at Boston Children’s Hospital. “This gives the eye with amblyopia time to catch up.”

Unfortunately, eye patching doesn’t work well at older ages, and kids hate the socially stigmatizing patches, which often need to be worn for more than a year. As Dean Travers, cofounder of Luminopia, put it at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Innovators’ Showcase last week, “Being a pirate isn’t cool for very long.” …

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A 30-minute screening test for dyslexia?

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Diagnostics, Innovation
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dyslexia screening test
A dyslexia screening app in development could flag children at risk as early as age 4, when interventions are most effective.

Ten to 12 percent of school-aged children have dyslexia. It’s typically diagnosed in second or third grade, only after a child has struggled unsuccessfully at reading. As Nadine Gaab, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital puts it, diagnosis is primarily based upon a “wait-to-fail-approach.” And that comes along with considerable psychological damage and stigma.

“Late diagnosis of dyslexia very often leads to low self-esteem, depression and antisocial behavior,” she says. A much better time to look for early signs of dyslexia would be kindergarten or first grade. With early intervention, many children can attain an average reading ability. …

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