An Iowa businessman says 3D-printed human organs can help doctors practice surgeries before actually opening up a real body.

Mark Ginsberg — an Iowa City jewelry store owner, who also has a manufacturing facility with a couple of 3D-printers — has partnered with physicians to help 3D print organ models or whatever they might need, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

A surgeon can provide a CT scan of a patient's organ and that can be translated into information for 3D printing. Recently, Ginsberg 3D-printed a photopolymer heart model for a University of Iowa surgeon, who had a young patient with a hole in the heart, the Press-Citizen reported.

“This way, they can hold the actual heart in their hand, the physiology of that heart, the rendering of that heart, and pregame the direction of the tools, the angle of the tools and how they’re going to attack different vessels,” Ginsberg told the newspaper. Read more…

Read More »

Brittany Wenger isn't your average high-school senior: She taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia.

The 18-year-old student from Sarasota, Fla. built a custom, cloud-based "artificial neural network" to find patterns in genetic expression profiles to diagnose patients with an aggressive form of cancer called mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL). Simply put, this means Wenger taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia by creating a diagnostic tool for doctors to use.

Since artificial neural networks are programs that model the brain's neurons and their interconnections, Wenger told Mashable that they "can actually learn to detect things that transcend human knowledge."

Mixed-lineage leukemia generally has poor prognosis, and the five-year survival rate is only 40%. Since Wenger said "different types of cancer have different molecular fingerprints," she discovered four particular gene expressions in the body that can be targeted to create MLL-specific drugs. Not only did she create a powerful diagnostic tool for this cancer, but her findings might also help develop new treatments.

Wenger, who is graduating soon from The Out-of-Door Academy in Sarasota, previously used artificial-intelligence technology to diagnose breast cancer. With a non-invasive procedure, her technology was able to help determine whether a breast mass was malignant or benign. Wenger's new findings with leukemia prove that her Cloud4Cancer service (check it out, here) can be altered to improve diagnostics for multiple cancer classifications. Read more…

Read More »