Computers that are trained to recognize patterns and interpret images may outperform humans at finding cancer on X-rays.
Media Coverage
The work done by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine faculty members (and even some students) is regularly highlighted in newspapers, online media outlets and more. Below you’ll find links to articles and videos of Feinberg in the news.
The Quiet Brain of the Athlete
Top athletes’ brains are not as noisy as yours and mine, according to a fascinating new study of elite competitors and how they process sound. But “making sense of sound is actually one of the most complex jobs we ask of our brains,” says Nina Kraus, a professor and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, who oversaw the new study.
Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health entering the 2020s
“Black youths too often receive the messages that their lives are not valued and that they are less deserving of support, nurturing and protection than their peers of other backgrounds,” wrote Burnett-Zeiggler, who’s an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern Medical School.
Scientists at Northwestern University outside Chicago have discovered why these conditions develop in the nascent brain, raising hopes that better treatment for them can be found. “We have solved an important piece of the puzzle in understanding how this mutation causes intellectual disabilities and mental illness,” said Peter Penzes, director of the Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment at Northwestern’s medical school and lead author of a paper on the subject that will be published Thursday in the journal Neuron.
A Prescription of Poetry to Help Patients Speak Their Minds
Dr. Joshua Hauser approached the bedside of his patient, treatment in hand. But it wasn’t medicine he carried. It was a copy of a 19th-century poem titled “Invictus.”
Based on these findings, heart doctors will be thinking long and hard about adding colchicine to the drug cocktail prescribed to heart attack patients, said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Rogers and his team at Northwestern report a new wireless and battery-free smart skin that could shift the course of this technology. Through a fast, programmable array of miniature vibrating disks embedded in a soft, flexible material, this smart skin can contour to the body and deliver sensory input — what you’d feel when using it — that Rogers says is quite natural.
Dr. Jeremiah Stamler is considered the father of preventive cardiology. He’s been a professor at Northwestern Medicine since 1959. “The current policy of the American Heart Association talks about achieving healthy lifestyle across the board,” said Dr. Philip Greenland, a longtime colleague of Stamler’s. “Healthy exercise, healthy weight, healthy diet, nonsmoking and prevention of diabetes.” And all of those recommendations, says Greenland, stem from Stamler’s research.
“Our study shows black and Hispanic women experience disparities in pain management in the postpartum setting,” said study leader Dr. Nevert Badreldin from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “These disparities cannot be explained by less perceived pain,” Badreldin said in a statement. Just 4.2% of white women reported pain scores of 5 or higher, compared with 7.7% of Hispanic women and 11.8% of black women, researchers report in Obstetrics & Gynecology.
AHA expert Kiarri Kershaw called the study a strong and important one. It is “really important for people, clinicians and others to really understand how implicit bias can kind of creep into decision-making, and how it can have an important impact on outcomes,” she said. “The first step is to be aware and acknowledge that you yourself might be biased, and these biases might be influencing you and try and seek ways to address it,” she said.