A head-mounted device that generates an ultra-low frequency ultralow magnetic field has been found to improve the symptoms of four male patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Future trials using the device may offer a safe and noninvasive way of treating depression. The results were published in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry.
The presence of a magnetic field with frequencies typically ranging from 0 to 300 Hz is known as an Extremely Low Frequency Magnetic Environment (ELF-ELME). Although the interaction between magnetic fields and biological systems is complex and not well understood, this frequency is believed to stimulate mitochondria and induce their renewal. Since mitochondria generate energy, they offer a potential way to treat many of the symptoms associated with depression such as lethargy.
For this study, the research team led by Professor Toshiya Inada at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine and Masako Tachibana of Nagoya University Hospital in Japan enrolled four male Japanese participants diagnosed with depression and receiving treatment between the ages of 18 and 75 years in a clinical trial known as an exploratory first-in human study.
In exploratory studies such as this, both participants and researchers are aware of the treatment being administered. Although the sample size is small and there is no control group, researchers can focus on gathering preliminary data to explore the safety, dosage, and potential efficacy of a new intervention.
Throughout the trial, participants wore a head-mounted magnetic field device that exposed them to ELF-ELME for two hours per day for eight weeks. As predicted, the researchers found that all patients reported a drop in their level of depression.
Although the experiment was an exploratory trial with a limited number of participants and no control group, the findings suggest that larger scale clinical trials are feasible. If such trials prove to be effective, their research could lead to a groundbreaking change in the current clinical practice of depression treatment.
Inada believes that the device has great potential to treat depression more effectively in a patient-centered way. “The magnetic field generated by the device is non-invasive, being 1/4.5 of the Japanese geomagnetic field and less than 1/60 of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection’s general public exposure standard,” he said, “We anticipate that patients will be able to receive daily home treatment without even being aware of being in a low magnetic field environment.”
He continued: “Compared to current depression treatments, such as long-term antidepressant medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, this therapy is superior in terms of convenience and lack of anticipated side effects. We could see our device being used for patients who prefer not to take medication or safely in combination with other treatments.”

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä have found that herpesvirus infection modifies the structure and normal function of the mitochondria in the host cell. The new information will help to understand the interaction between herpesvirus and host cells. Knowledge can be utilized in the development of viral treatments.
Herpesviruses not only cause significant diseases but are also promising candidates for oncolytic therapy. The HSV-1 infection depends on the nuclear DNA replication, transcription machinery, and mitochondrial metabolism of the host cell. In the Department of Biological and Environmental Science of the University of Jyväskylä, docent Maija Vihinen-Ranta, with her research team, investigated time-dependent mitochondrial changes as HSV-1 infection proceeds from early to late infection.
New information on the interaction between the herpesvirus and the host cell
Recent research shows that the infection leads to significant transcriptional modification of genes encoding proteins involved in the mitochondrial network, such as the respiratory chain, apoptosis, and the structural organization of mitochondria. Findings indicate that the infection leads to significant alterations in mitochondrial structure and function, including changes in mitochondrial morphology and distribution, thickening and shortening of cristae, an increase in the number and area of contact sites between mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, as well as a rise in mitochondrial calcium ion content and proton leak.
– Our results show how the progression of infection shifts the balance from healthy to diseased cells and leads to profound perturbations in mitochondrial homeostasis. This can yield further knowledge about the interaction between herpesvirus and host cells, states docent Maija Vihinen-Ranta from the University of Jyväskylä. She continues to say that this knowledge can be utilized in the development of viral treatments.

A research group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan have used whole-genome sequencing to unravel the complex ancestry of the Japanese population. The analysis supports an earlier study that proposed that the Japanese population originated from admixtures of three ancestral groups, challenging the long-held dual-structure model, and also provides new evidence of Neanderthal and Denisovan influences in the population.
The study, published in Science Advances, started with the group performing whole-genome sequencing on 3,256 samples from the Biobank Japan — a large collection of samples collected from hospitals in Japan. The samples were chosen to reflect the population distribution of Japanese throughout the archipelago, from Hokkaido in the northeast to Okinawa and the other Ryukyu islands in the south.
The first finding was that the Japanese population can be optimally divided into three clusters, with different concentrations in Okinawa, Northeastern Japan, and Western Japan. While it was previously believed that the current Japanese people are mainly descended either from the indigenous Jomon population or other East Asians, principally Han Chinese, the research group found that there is also a Northeast Asian ancestry, which is likely composed of people from the Korean peninsula or from early non-Jomon Japanese populations. They found that Jomon ancestry was most dominant in Okinawa, where it made up 28.5 percent of the sampled people’s DNA, though it also made up roughly 19 percent in Northeastern Japan and 12 percent in Western Japan, and was slightly higher in the south of Japan, closest to Okinawa. The East Asian ancestry, generally understood to be from China, was most common in Western Japan, gradually decreasing to the east, while the Northeast Asian lineage was most common in Northeastern Japan, decreasing to the west.
To see whether these findings could provide insights into clinically relevant genetic variants, they examined two well-known pathogenic variants associated with hereditary breast cancer. The first, a variant of the BRCA1 gene, is only found in Japanese populations, and is more common in the east than the west of the country. This implied that it arose in Japanese people with Northeast Asian ancestry and then spread westward. The other, a variant of the BRCA2 gene, is more common in the west, and is also found in China and Korea, leading to the conclusion that this variant was likely brought into Japan from continental Asia.
The study also offered insights into gene sequences derived from Neanderthals and Denisovans — extinct human lineages that existed together with modern humans and left us genes through a process known as introgression, a gradual movement of genes from one lineage into another through hybridization. Specifically, they found gene sequences associated with type 2 diabetes and height derived from Denisovans, and while they mostly confirmed previous studies regarding gene introgressions from Neanderthals, they also found an interesting link to another gene associated with type 2 diabetes, which might affect sensitivity to semaglutide, an oral agent used to treat the disease.
According to Chikashi Terao, leader of the research group, “Though our findings were interesting because of the new insights they have given us into the origins of the Japanese people, we also believe that our work will serve as a reference for future genetic research beyond the Japanese population, as it could be used in areas such as personalized medicine.”

Early embryonic development is tumultuous. It involves a rapid sequence of events, including cell division, differentiation, and lots of compartments moving around within each cell. Like an orchestra performance where each member of the band must start playing at the exact right moment and in perfect harmony, these processes need to be precisely timed and coordinated to ensure the embryo develops normally.
How cells make sense of this chaos at the very beginning of an embryo’s development is an open question. The protein NKX1-2 a crucial role, according to a new study published today in the journal Stem Cell Reports by ICREA Research Professor Pia Cosma at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and Professor Andrea Califano President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York and Professor at Columbia University.
NKX1-2 behaves like an orchestra’s conductor, skilfully ensuring that the genetic instructions for developing the embryo are executed correctly and at the right times. The protein helps manage the production and organisation of the cell’s machinery for making proteins (like ribosomes) and is also crucial for keeping chromosomes organized and properly distributed when cells divide.
When the researchers experimentally inhibited the function of NKX1-2 in mice, they found the nucleolus (a part of the nucleus that assembles ribosomes) was severely altered, disrupting the embryo’s ability to produce ribosomes correctly. They also found the 2- to 4-cell embryos could not distribute chromosomes correctly during cell division, and would stop growing at these very early stages of development.
“NKX1-2 belongs to a protein family which is known to play crucial roles in early development and organ formation. While we knew that members of this family were important in general development, NKX1-2’s specific role, especially in early embryonic stages, wasn’t well understood,” explains ICREA Research Professor Pia Cosma, corresponding author of the study.
“It is intriguing that such mechanistic determinants of embryogenesis could be identified by assembling and interrogating a mouse embryonic stem cell regulatory network, using methodologies originally developed for cancer research,” adds Dr. Califano, co-corresponding author on the study.
Given the similarities in early developmental processes between mice and humans, the findings offer new clues into unexplained causes of developmental problems, including miscarriages. Miscarriages often result from chromosomal abnormalities, which can arise from issues like those observed in the study — improper chromosome segregation and cell division errors. Further research could explore if there is a human counterpart that influences these fundamental processes as it does in mice, and what happens when it fails.
Despite the importance of NKX1-2 in early embryo development, the researchers suspect more ‘conductors’ remain to be discovered. “NKX1-2 is expressed at very low levels, which makes it extremely difficult to detect. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack using traditional methods in biology. Repeating our methods could help find other rare and critical elements that have been historically overlooked,” adds Dr. Cosma.

A feast cooked up by UBC researchers has revealed singlet oxygen indoors for the first time.
Oxi-don’t
Singlet oxygen is an oxidant. These chemical compounds can be beneficial — ozone in the stratosphere is one example — but can also cause stress to our lungs, contributing to the development of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease in the long term.
Cooking foods can release brown carbon, molecules with the potential to create oxidants when they absorb light. In addition, exposure to cooking emissions has been linked to chronic diseases in chefs.
Historically, it was thought there wasn’t enough light indoors to have much reactive chemistry, but there are many light sources in modern kitchens.
Sprouts + sunlight = oxidant
UBC researchers thought if all the right ingredients were in place — namely, cooking in a lit area — they might find singlet oxygen indoors where it had never been detected.

They investigated by cooking three meals representing breakfast, lunch and dinner: pancakes, Brussels sprouts, and vegetable stir fry, sampling the air and exposing it to three different types of light: UV, sunlight, and fluorescent.
They detected singlet oxygen at around the same concentration for all three dishes. However, its highest concentration occurred in sunlit experiments, meaning naturally lit kitchens likely see more of this oxidant.
Venting is healthy
The COVID-19 pandemic has helped raise public awareness of indoor air quality.
The researchers recommend ventilation and air filtration in kitchens to reduce exposure to aerosols while cooking.
“Our next steps include determining just how this oxidant might affect humans and how much we’re breathing in when we cook. Could it play a role in some cooking-related diseases?” said senior author Dr. Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, UBC chemistry assistant professor.

A small, implantable cardiac pump that could help children await heart transplants at home, not in the hospital, has performed well in the first stage of human testing.
The pump, a new type of ventricular assist device, or VAD, is surgically attached to the heart to augment its blood-pumping action in individuals with heart failure, allowing time to find a donor heart. The new pump could close an important gap in heart transplant care for children.
In a feasibility trial of seven children who received the new pump to support their failing hearts, six ultimately underwent heart transplants and one child’s heart recovered, rendering a transplant unnecessary. The results will be published May 7 in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation. The study was led by the Stanford School of Medicine and included several medical centers in the United States.
If the early results are confirmed in a larger trial of the device, waiting for a heart transplant could become easier for small children and their families. The new pump, called the Jarvik 2015 ventricular assist device, is slightly larger than an AA battery and can be implanted in children weighing as little as 18 pounds. With the pump implanted, kids can take part in many normal activities while they wait for a heart transplant.
By contrast, the only ventricular assist device available to support small children whose hearts are failing, a pump called the Berlin Heart, is not implantable; it is as big as a large suitcase. It weighs between 60 and 200 pounds depending on the model, and is attached to the child with two cannulas almost as large as garden hoses.
The Berlin Heart also carries a fairly high stroke risk and requires hospitalization in most instances, meaning kids often endure months-long hospital stays while they wait for a donor heart. As a result, the burden on children awaiting heart transplant is much higher than it is for adults implanted with heart pumps, who are routinely discharged from the hospital with similar diagnoses.
“While we are extremely grateful to have the Berlin Heart, a life-saving device, ventricular assist devices for adults have been improving every decade, but in pediatrics we’re using technology from the 1960s,” said the study’s lead author, pediatric cardiologist Christopher Almond, MD, professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine.

Implantable ventricular assist devices have been available to adults for more than 40 years, Almond noted. Not only do these devices fit inside patients’ chests but they tend to be safer and easier to use than external devices like the Berlin Heart. Patients can live at home, go to work or school, take walks and ride bicycles.
The lag in pediatric technology is a problem for other devices designed to help children with heart conditions, and in pediatrics in general, Almond noted. “There’s a huge difference in the medical technology available to kids and adults, which is an important public health problem that that markets have struggled to fix because conditions like heart failure are rare in children,” he said.
The study’s senior author is William Mahle, MD, chief of cardiology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Far fewer children than adults need heart transplants, leaving little incentive for medical device companies to develop a miniaturized pump for children. But the lack of a small ventricular assist device for children strains the medical system, as children attached to the Berlin Heart accrue large medical bills and can occupy hospital beds in specialized cardiovascular care units for several months, potentially reducing the availability of these beds for other patients.
Promising early findings
The feasibility trial of the Jarvik 2015 ventricular assist device included seven children with systolic heart failure. The condition affects the heart’s largest pumping chamber, the left ventricle, which pumps blood from the heart throughout the body. Six children had systolic heart failure caused by a disease called dilated cardiomyopathy, in which the heart muscle becomes enlarged and weakened and does not pump correctly. One child’s heart was failing because of complete heart block (electrical failure of the heart) stemming from lupus, an autoimmune disease. All children in the trial were on a heart transplant list.

Each child had a Jarvik 2015 device surgically implanted at the left ventricle, the heart’s largest pumping chamber. At the same time, each was started on medication to prevent blood clots and lower the risk of stroke. When they received their pumps, the children were 8 months to 7 years old and weighed 18 to 46 pounds. The pump can be used for children who weigh up to 66 pounds.
If the new pump is approved by medical regulators, physicians estimate that about 200 to 400 children worldwide would be candidates for its use each year.
The trial assessed whether the pump could support patients for at least 30 days without ceasing to function or causing severe stroke. The researchers also collected preliminary safety and performance data to help them design a larger pivotal trial for possible Food and Drug Administration approval.
Although the pump is ideally intended to allow children to await heart transplants at home, because they were part of a clinical trial, the participants stayed in the hospital for monitoring until they received a heart transplant or recovered. The researchers tracked participants’ blood pressure, a marker for blood clot and stroke risk; measured hemoglobin levels to check whether the pumps were breaking red blood cells; and monitored patients for other complications.
The median time the children used the pump was 149 days. Six children received heart transplants, and one child’s heart recovered.
A few children experienced complications on the new pump. The child whose heart recovered had an ischemic stroke (from a blood clot) when the heart became strong enough to compete with the pump. The pump was removed, and the child continued to recover and was alive a year later. Another patient experienced failure of the right side of the heart and was transferred to a Berlin Heart pump to await transplant.
For most patients, complications were manageable and generally comparable to what physicians expect when a child is attached to a Berlin Heart.
Questionnaires about quality of life showed that most children were not bothered by the device, did not feel pain from it and could participate in most play activities. One family reported that their toddler was able to maintain much more mobility with the pump than his older sibling who had previously been supported with the Berlin Heart.
Larger trial planned
The National Institutes of Health has awarded funding for an expanded trial that will enable researchers to further test the utility of the new pump and generate data to submit to the FDA for approval. The next phase of research is launching now; investigators aim to enroll the first patient by the end of 2024. The research team plans to enroll 22 participants at 14 medical centers in the United States and two sites in Europe.
“We’re excited to launch the next phase of the research,” Almond said. “We’ve overcome a number of challenges to get the work this far, and it’s very exciting that there may be better options on the horizon for children with end-stage heart failure who require a pump that can act as a bridge to transplant.”
Researchers contributed to the study from the University of Texas Southwestern; Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston; Columbia University; Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; Nemours Children’s Hospital, Florida; Vanderbilt University Medical Center; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Carelon Research; Stollery Children’s Hospital; the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto; Boston Children’s Hospital; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital; and the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa.
The study was funded by a contract from the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institution (grant number HHS N268201200001I).

Scientists have discovered a groundbreaking new snakebite treatment to prevent the devastating tissue damage caused by African spitting cobra venom.
Spitting cobra venom is incredibly potent and causes dermonecrosis, which presents as rapid destruction of skin, muscle and bone around the site of the snakebite, and can lead to permanent injuries and disfigurements, including limb loss and amputations in extreme cases.
Professor Nicholas Casewell and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine colleagues including Dr Steven Hall — who is now at Lancaster University- discovered that using the repurposed small molecule drug varespladib to block one of the two major dermonecrosis-causing toxins in spitting cobra venom prevents skin and muscle damage.
Each year, it is estimated that snakebite causes long term detrimental effects in around 400,000 people across the world, with a substantial proportion of those in Africa the result of spitting cobra bites.
Currently, there is no effective treatment for tackling severe local envenoming caused by spitting cobra venom. Existing antivenoms only work on bites by other snake species and are often ineffective for treating local envenoming because antivenom antibodies are too large to effectively penetrate into the region around the bite site.
Professor Nicholas Casewell of LSTM said: “Our findings hold much promise to improve the treatment of tropical snakebite. Current treatments for spitting cobra bites are widely regarded as being ineffective, meaning that rates of disability and amputation have remained high across much of Africa. Our data shows that blocking just one of the main toxin families in spitting cobra venom will likely prevent the debilitating tissue damage seen in thousands of snakebite patients each year.”
Professor Casewell’s team, led by PhD student Keirah Bartlett and Dr Steven Hall, then of LSTM and now at Lancaster University, and also involving researchers from Canada, Denmark, Costa Rica and the USA, first analysed spitting cobra venom to identify the toxins responsible for causing venom-induced dermonecrosis. The results showed that cytotoxic three-finger toxins (CTx) are largely responsible but that phospholipases A2 (PLA2) toxins play a critical role in the process.

Local injection of the PLA2-inhibiting drug varespladib reduced the extent of dermonecrosis, even when delivered up to an hour after the venom, and the protection conferred by the drug also extended to venom-induced muscle toxicity.
According to the authors, the findings suggest that varespladib could become an invaluable treatment against the tissue-damaging effects of black-necked and red spitting cobra venoms, which cause extensive morbidity in snakebite victims across the African continent.
Lead author Keirah Bartlett said: “These findings are extremely promising, not only does this offer up a new mode of treatment where previously nothing effective existed, but because varespladib has already gone through testing in human clinical trials, including for snakebite, it could be available for use in real world patients very soon.”
Dr Hall added: “Snakebite is a devastating neglected tropical disease, with tissue destruction caused by necrotic snake venoms permanently injuring hundreds of thousands of victims every year. Our work shows that the repurposed drug, Varespladib, is incredibly effective at inhibiting such necrosis caused by African spitting cobras; an exciting finding as their venoms are particularly fast-acting and destructive. We hope this work helps pave the way to future snakebite therapies that can save the lives and limbs of victims worldwide.”
Professor Casewell’s team are already looking for viable treatments that effectively block the venom CTx. Having treatments available against both toxins has the potential to enhance the potency of varespladib, and could significantly reduce the long-term morbidity associated with spitting cobra bites in Africa and beyond.

A group of researchers from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, University of Freiburg and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have created an exceptionally small implant, with electrodes the size of a single neuron that can also remain intact in the body over time — a unique combination that holds promise for future vision implants for the blind.
Often when a person is blind, some or part of the eye is damaged, but the visual cortex in the brain is still functioning and waiting for input. When considering brain stimulation for sight restoration, there needs to be thousands of electrodes going into an implant to build up enough information for an image. By sending electrical impulses via an implant to the visual cortex of the brain, an image can be created, and each electrode would represent one pixel.
“This image would not be the world as someone with full vision would be able to see it. The image created by electrical impulses would be like the matrix board on a highway, a dark space and some spots that would light up depending on the information you are given. The more electrodes that ‘feed’ into it, the better the image would be,” says Maria Asplund, who led the technology development part of the project and is Professor of Bioelectronics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
The vision implant created in this study can be described as a ‘thread’ with many electrodes placed in a row, one after the other. In the long term you would need several threads with thousands of electrodes connected to each one, and the results of this study are a key step towards such an implant.
The future of vision implants
An electrical implant to improve vision in people with blindness is not a new concept. However, the implant technology currently being explored in human patients is from the 1990s and there are several factors that need to be improved, for example the bulky size, scarring in the brain due to their large size, materials corroding over time and materials being too rigid.
By creating a really small electrode the size of a single neuron, researchers have the potential to fit lots of electrodes onto a single implant and build up a more detailed image for the user. The unique mix of flexible, non-corrosive materials make this a long-term solution for vision implants.

“Miniaturisation of vision implant components is essential. Especially the electrodes, as they need to be small enough to be able to resolve stimulation to large numbers of spots in the ‘brain visual areas’. The main research question for the team was, ‘can we fit that many electrodes on an implant with the materials we have and make it small enough and also effective?’ and the answer from this study was- yes,” says Professor Asplund.
The smaller the size, the worse the corrosion
To create an electrical implant on such a small scale comes with its challenges, especially in a tough environment, such as the human body. The major obstacle is not to make the electrodes small, but to make such small electrodes last a long time in a moist, humid environment. Corrosion of metals in surgical implants is a huge problem, and because the metal is the functional part, as well as the corroding part, the amount of metal is key. The electrical implant that Asplund and her team have created measures in at a miniscule 40 micrometers wide and 10 micrometers thick, like a split hair, with the metal parts being only a few hundred nanometers in thickness. And since there is so little metal in the super tiny vision electrode, it cannot ‘afford’ to corrode at all, otherwise it would stop working.
In the past, this problem has not been possible to solve. But now, the research team have created a unique mix of materials layered up together that do not corrode. This includes a conducting polymer to transduce the electrical stimulation required for the implant to work, to electrical responses in the neurons. The polymer forms a protective layer on the metal and makes the electrode much more resilient to corrosion, essentially a protective layer of plastic covering the metal.
“The conducting polymer metal combination we have implemented is revolutionary for vision implants as it would mean they hopefully could remain functional for the entire implant life-time. We now know it is possible to make electrodes as small as a neuron (nerve cell) and keep this electrode effectively working in the brain over very long timespans, which is promising since this has been missing until now. The next step will be to create an implant that can have connections for 1000s of electrodes,” says Asplund, something that is currently explored within a larger team in the ongoing EU project Neuraviper.
More about: the study method
The method was implemented by the research collaborators at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, where mice were trained to respond to an electrical impulse to the visual cortex of the brain. The study showed that not only could the mice learn to react to the stimulation applied via the electrodes in just a few sessions, but the minimal current threshold for which mice reported a perception was lower than standard metal-based implants. The research team further reported that the functionality of the implant stayed stable over time, for one mouse even until the end of its natural lifespan.

A sharp rise in exposures to synthetic cannabis products among youth — some leading to hospitalization — highlights the need for increased education around the dangers of exposure and increased focus on safe storage and packaging, according to pediatricians and researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Central Ohio Poison Center.
A new study conducted by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Central Ohio Poison Center examined trends in calls to poison centers across the country for exposures to different types of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC): delta-8 THC, delta-10 THC and THC-O acetate. These products are often referred to as “diet weed” or “hemp products,” which leads to a misperception that they are safer alternatives to the more regulated and more abundant delta-9 THC.
The study, published in Clinical Toxicology, found increases in the number of exposures in multiple age groups, with unintentional ingestions by young children being especially concerning.
“Many people don’t realize how toxic these products can be, especially to young children. One in four children needed to be hospitalized after exposure,” said Hannah Hays, MD, co-author of the study, medical director of the Central Ohio Poison Center and faculty of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s. “If someone vapes, smokes, eats edibles or drinks infused beverages with delta-8, delta-10 THC or THC-O, all of those products should be stored up, away, and out of sight and reach of children, preferably in a locked container. These products should never be used in front of kids who might mistake them for food or drinks that they are allowed to have.”
Data Highlights
According to the study: U.S. poison centers received 1,746 calls related to delta-8 THC, delta-10 THC, and THC-O acetate exposures in 2021. This number increased by 88% to 3,276 in 2022 — an average of one call every 2.6 hours. Most cases were single-substance (94%), ingestions (94%) that occurred at a residence (96%) in 20-59-year-olds (40%),

Researchers at Mass General Brigham have harnessed the technology behind foundation models, which power tools like ChatGPT, to discover new cancer imaging biomarkers that could transform how patterns are identified from radiological images. Improved identification of such patterns can greatly impact the early detection and treatment of cancer.
The research team developed their foundation model using a comprehensive dataset consisting of 11,467 images of abnormal radiologic scans. Using these images, the model was able to identify patterns that predict anatomical site, malignancy, and prognosis across three different use cases in four cohorts. Compared to existing methods in the field, their approach remained powerful when applied to specialized tasks where only limited data are available. Results are published in Nature Machine Intelligence.
“Given that image biomarker studies are tailored to answer increasingly specific research questions, we believe that our work will enable more accurate and efficient investigations,” said first author Suraj Pai from the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) Program at Mass General Brigham.
Despite the improved efficacy of AI methods, a key question remains their reliability and explainability (the concept that an AI’s answers can be explained in a way that “makes sense” to humans). The researchers demonstrated that their methods remained stable across inter-reader variations and differences in acquisition. Patterns identified by the foundation model also demonstrated strong associations with underlying biology, mainly correlating with immune-related pathways.
“Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of foundation models in medicine when only limited data might be available for training deep learning networks, especially when applied to identifying reliable imaging biomarkers for cancer-associated use cases,” said senior author Hugo Aerts, PhD, director of the AIM Program.