https://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Enriching the diet with wheat fiber protects mice against intestinal inflammation, according to a study published by researchers at the Institute for Biomedical Sciences (IBMS) at Georgia State University. The finding helps explain why the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has increased, and suggests eating whole wheat foods may reduce one's risk of developing it. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-fiber-wheat-foods-gut-inflammation.html Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:00:01 EDT news693655802 The U.S. burden of blinding retinal conditions is high, according to a meta-analysis published online March 19 in JAMA Ophthalmology. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-prevalence-retinal-conditions-high.html Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:40:03 EDT news693574219 Autoimmune neuromuscular diseases may sound complex, but understanding them is the first step to getting the right care and support. Conditions such as Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS), myasthenia gravis (MG), and inclusion body myositis (IBM) affect how muscles and nerves communicate, leading to muscle weakness and fatigue. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-10-autoimmune-neuromuscular-diseases-treatment.html Thu, 23 Oct 2025 07:10:01 EDT news680421912 An estimated one in five Americans live with chronic pain and current treatment options leave much to be desired. Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., Director of Cleveland Clinic's Genome Center, and IBM are using artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery in advanced pain management. The team's deep-learning framework identified multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs that can be repurposed to select non-addictive, non-opioid options to treat chronic pain. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-ai-opioid-pain-relief-options.html Sun, 06 Oct 2024 06:11:16 EDT news647413864 Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and IBM have published a strategy for identifying new targets for immunotherapy through artificial intelligence (AI). This is the first peer-reviewed publication from the two organizations' Discovery Accelerator partnership, designed to advance research in health care and life sciences. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-ai-strategy-immunotherapy.html Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:11:20 EST news625248677 The tell-tale signs of dementia are familiar to many of us, with memory loss, confusion, and difficulty concentrating that gradually get worse over time. But it's not easy to identify the particular type of dementia that someone has since the symptoms can be bafflingly similar, as in the case of Alzheimer's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Now researchers at IBM Research and the University of Tsukuba, Japan, have developed a new way to distinguish between these diseases based on patients' speech. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-11-mind-patients-speech-reveal-dementia.html Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:52:22 EDT news586605139 When it comes to treatment strategies for critically ill patients, clinicians want to be able to consider all their options and timing of administration, and make the optimal decision for their patients. While clinician experience and study has helped them to be successful in this effort, not all patients are the same, and treatment decisions at this crucial time could mean the difference between patient improvement and quick deterioration. Therefore, it would be helpful for doctors to be able to take a patient's previous known health status and received treatments and use that to predict that patient's health outcome under different treatment scenarios, in order to pick the best path. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-02-deep-learning-technique-clinical-treatment-outcomes.html Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:31:21 EST news565003876 Accurate modeling is one of the tools being used to fight the COVID-19 pandemic globally. It is essential for policy makers, experts and the population to get access to reliable information on the evolution and severity of the pandemic based on relevant and robust advanced analytics and modeling. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-ai-covid-hotspots-gauteng.html Tue, 22 Dec 2020 09:10:06 EST news527849719 Hackers are targeting the coronavirus vaccine supply chain, IBM warned Thursday, saying it had uncovered a series of cyber attacks against companies involved in the effort to distribute doses around the world. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-hackers-covid-vaccine-chain-ibm.html Thu, 03 Dec 2020 12:50:01 EST news526220754 Many patients see their tumors shrink in response to a drug, only to have them come back with a vengeance as they evolve to fend off the treatment. Oncologists want to be able to quickly detect cancer drug resistance as it emerges in their patients and identify another drug the tumors will still respond to. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-09-liquid-biopsies-reveal-genetic-linked.html Mon, 09 Sep 2019 13:53:05 EDT news487255976 Researchers at the University of Zurich and from IBM Research have investigated the varying composition of cancer and immune cells in over 100 breast tumors. They've found that aggressive tumors are often dominated by a single type of tumor cell. If certain immune cells are present as well, an immune therapy could be successful for a specific group of breast cancer patients. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-04-precise-decoding-breast-cancer-cells.html Tue, 16 Apr 2019 07:07:12 EDT news474617223 The romaine lettuce E. coli scare is over, but it's taken consumers a while to toss the vitamin rich leafy greens in a salad again. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-blockchain-food-chain-romaine-lettuce.html Mon, 26 Nov 2018 09:45:20 EST news462447906 According to the US Center for Disease Control, the number of worldwide cases of poliomyelitis has decreased from 350,000 in 1988 to 407 in 2013. While the decline has been steady, polio has still not been eradicated. To try and help solve the problem, biologists and mathematicians from IBM, UCSF, Stanford University, and the University of Haifa are working side-by-side on a DARPA-funded research project to engineer a new type of antiviral agent against viruses such as polio. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-exploring-combat-disease-causing-viruses.html Fri, 03 Aug 2018 07:39:37 EDT news452500767 As a scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Laboratory, James Hedrick was well aware of the global problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can turn a minor scrape into a death sentence. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-04-ibm-lab-molecule-drug-resistant-superbugs.html Fri, 06 Apr 2018 05:10:01 EDT news442207795 Cancer continues to be a deadly threat to more than 14 million people who are diagnosed each year around the world. At the same time, five-year survival rates have been steadily improving over the last three decades to nearly 70 percent, according to the American Cancer Society. However, current cancer treatment regimens, such as traditional radiation therapies, often kill healthy cells along with diseased ones. Chemotherapy, or the use of anti-cancer drugs, can fail as drug resistance in the treatment of cancer has become commonplace, both with existing drug-resistant cancer cells as well as induced resistance. So devastating is the issue of drug resistance, that it is a critical aim of the Cancer Moonshot, a program established by the U.S. government, to vastly accelerate cancer research. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-synthetic-macromolecules-multidrug-resistant-cancer-cells.html Thu, 15 Mar 2018 09:39:49 EDT news440325574 The lifespan of cells in the human body varies greatly, from as short as a few days, such as those in our stomach lining, to the cells in our bones, which live for 25-30 years. And for each healthy cell, no matter how long it lives, there is a tightly coordinated series of events that lead to its division and the creation of two identical daughter cells. This is called the cell cycle. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-machine-cell-method.html Mon, 26 Feb 2018 09:10:20 EST news438858095 Psychiatrists characterize schizophrenia, a mental condition with devastating effects on those who suffer it, by a set of intuitively understandable concepts including "poverty of speech" and "flight of ideas." These concepts, however, are subjective in the sense that their quantification depends significantly on the particular training and ultimate judgment of individual psychiatrists. The evaluation of a patient is not only subject to this uncertainty, but also to the availability of these highly trained professionals, and to the clinical facilities where evaluation is usually performed. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-01-psychotic-onset-ai-language-analysis.html Wed, 24 Jan 2018 07:01:51 EST news435999699 Every nine minutes, someone in the US dies from blood cancer which accounts for about 10 percent of all cancer deaths. And, every three minutes, one person in the US is diagnosed with a blood cancer—about 170,000 people annually. In 2017, 62,130 people were expected to be diagnosed with leukemia. These numbers are staggering, and scientists do not fully understand the causes of the disease. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-genomics-ai-boundary-precision-medicine.html Wed, 27 Dec 2017 08:42:32 EST news433586543 Before joining IBM Research in Cambridge in September 2016, I completed a three-year postdoctoral training program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), working closely with Harvard faculty. Now, a collaboration between MGH and IBM Research has yielded a satisfying result – our manuscript, "The MELD-Plus: A Generalizable Prediction Risk Score in Cirrhosis," was published in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed online science journal. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-10-machine-surpass-meld-liver-disease.html Thu, 26 Oct 2017 09:33:10 EDT news428229174 The deadliest skin cancer is melanoma, which will be responsible for over 9,000 deaths in the United States in 2017. Melanoma is unique among cancers in that it arises as a visible and identifiable mark on the surface of the skin – unlike cancers of the breast, lung, or colon that develop hidden from our view. This would suggest that computer vision, which has demonstrated human equivalency in visual recognition tasks such as facial and object identification, would be ideally suited to aid in early detection of melanoma. However, physicians and patients continue to rely upon their naked eye to recognize melanoma. This begs an obvious question: why aren't computers aiding the human eye in melanoma detection? https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-10-aid-melanoma.html Thu, 05 Oct 2017 09:10:04 EDT news426409853 While building artificial systems does not necessarily require copying nature—after all, airplanes fly without flapping their wings like birds—the history of AI and machine learning convincingly demonstrates that drawing inspirations from neuroscience and psychology can lead to significant breakthroughs, with deep neural networks and reinforcement learning being perhaps the two most prominent examples. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-neuroscience-advance-machine.html Mon, 28 Aug 2017 08:05:59 EDT news423126207 IBM announced its researchers have used big data analytics to assess the impact of infected animal carriers, or an animal reservoir, in the spread of the Ebola virus in a way not been previously done for earlier disease models. Direct contact with the infected animal – most likely a bat or large snake—whether by touching or eating it—can cause the disease to enter the human population, and then spread. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-big-strategies-ebola.html Mon, 08 May 2017 06:13:24 EDT news413442796 Barrow Neurological Institute and IBM Watson Health today announced results of a revolutionary study that has identified new genes linked to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The discovery gives ALS researchers new insights that will pave the way for the development of new drug targets and therapies to combat one of the world's most devastating and deadly diseases. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-12-team-genes-responsible-als-imb.html Wed, 14 Dec 2016 17:39:39 EST news400959567 A new drug to treat the muscle wasting disease inclusion body myositis (IBM) reverses key symptoms in mice and is safe and well-tolerated in patients, finds a new study led by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases at University College London (UCL) and the University of Kansas Medical Center. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-03-drug-muscle-disease-inclusion-body.html Wed, 23 Mar 2016 14:00:01 EDT news377934164 Today, the first day of American Heart Month, the American Heart Association (AHA) announced plans to develop a first of its kind workplace health solution that leverages the cognitive computing power of IBM Watson. In the first application of Watson to cardiovascular disease, AHA, IBM, and Welltok will create a new offering that combines AHA's science-based metrics and health assessments with cognitive analytics, delivered on Welltok's health optimization platform. The effort is intended to help alleviate the burden of cardiovascular diseases, which affect more than 85 million Americans today. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-02-aha-ibm-watson-health-welltok.html Mon, 01 Feb 2016 12:43:32 EST news373552993 IBM on Tuesday said 14 US cancer treatment centers would join a partnership to get personalized care treatment plans from the company's Watson supercomputer. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-ibm-watson-cancer-insights-centers.html Tue, 05 May 2015 15:48:54 EDT news350059724 IBM announced today a collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering to research the application of cognitive computing to analyze dermatological images of skin lesions with the goal of assisting clinicians in the identification of various cancerous disease states. The technology, which learns by identifying specific patterns in medical images, has the potential to increase the number of cases detected and help clinicians make earlier diagnoses. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-12-scientists-cognitive-computing-based-visual-analytics.html Thu, 18 Dec 2014 06:40:19 EST news338107212 IBM announced Monday it would offer its analytics platform and other technology for use in African countries affected by the Ebola outbreak. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-ibm-analytics-platform-ebola.html Mon, 27 Oct 2014 10:05:26 EDT news333623117 Mayo Clinic and IBM today announced plans to pilot Watson, the IBM cognitive computer, to match patients more quickly with appropriate clinical trials. A proof-of-concept phase is currently underway, with the intent to introduce it into clinical use in early 2015. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-09-mayo-clinic-ibm-task-watson.html Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:10:01 EDT news329472034 IBM today announced a first-of-a-kind system that is designed to help food retailers, distributors and public health officials predict the most likely contaminated food sources and accelerate the investigation of food-borne disease outbreaks. Using novel algorithms, visualization, and statistical techniques, the tool can use information on the date and location of billions of supermarket food items sold each week to quickly identify with high probability a set of potentially "guilty" products with in as few as 10 outbreak case reports. This research was published today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Computational Biology together with collaborators from Johns Hopkins University, Purdue University and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-07-ibm-breakthrough-health-food-safety.html Fri, 04 Jul 2014 06:03:26 EDT news323672573