May 23, 2019
BRIDGING A HEALTHCARE GAP
Heart disease can be deadly for anyone, but it’s a particular challenge to treat in rural areas of China. A lack of medical resources in the countryside sometimes forces heart patients to travel hundreds of miles to better-equipped urban hospitals — a journey that’s taxing for patients as well as the healthcare system itself, as a typical outpatient department in Beijing can treat up to 10,000 people per day. Now, though, GE Healthcare engineers have figured out how doctors can use cloud technology to care for rural heart patients without missing a beat. The Cloud ECG platform provides software that captures patients’ heartbeats and other cardiac activity wherever they are, then pumps those images and underlying data into servers that expert physicians in central hospitals can access. “It’s like having the city doctor in the same room at the rural clinic,” said GE Healthcare’s Hu Lifei.
The heart-brain combo: Cloud ECG even comes with its own brain — AI-enabled software that continually analyzes the diagnoses in relation to the raw data. That means the more patients the system monitors, the smarter and more effective it becomes. In other words, it gets better every time a city doctor submits a report. Lifei says Cloud ECG has boosted the accuracy of diagnoses to “greater than 90%.” Technology similar to Cloud ECG, which has been deployed for two years in China, could soon be used in another Asian country with a huge population and underserved rural areas: India. “We are already discussing using the same system there — and possibly beyond,” Lifei said.
Read more here about what it takes to capture the pulse of the most populous country in the world.
A HUGHES ACCOMPLISHMENT
GE Reports has written a whole lot about 3D printing, but hasn’t covered the possibility that the technology could be used to rebuild the world’s ailing coral reefs — until now. That idea comes courtesy of an 11-year-old student at Hyde Park School in Cincinnati. She’s an enthusiastic participant in a 3D-printing club for girls spearheaded by Jessica Hughes, a teacher who specializes in STEM education. A few years ago, Hughes starting noticing that the boys in her sixth grade class on computer-aided design were much more confident in their mastery of the tech than the girls. That wasn’t because girls tested any less well in math and science, Hughes thought: Was it because of social pressure? Whatever the reason, she sought to rectify the imbalance, empowering her female students to seek better, higher-paying — and, frankly, more fun — careers.
Girls just wanna have advanced laser technology: Hughes coordinated with a GE program called GEMS, or Girls in Engineering, Math and Science, which brought female engineers to the school weekly to share their career paths and passions. Then in 2017, she hit the mother lode: GE had just launched a grant program to expose K-12 students to STEM through interactive 3D-printing projects. Hughes applied for and got the grant, and a whole lot else besides: Her school scored access to a cloud-based portal with three years’ worth of curriculum and learning tools, 3D-printing materials and a brand-new 3D printer. “It’s taken what we were doing to the next level,” she said.
Hughes’ students have designed and 3D-printed a prototype of a functional wind turbine for an African village; one student has made it a project to repair the world’s oceans, while another is learning to 3D-print prosthetic body parts. What else are these girls up to? Find out here.
WAYS OF SEEING
As physical objects, black holes might be infinitely dense — but simply trying to understand the physics behind them might make a layperson feel pretty dense, as well. Pictures can help, argues Felice Frankel, a research scientist in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Writing in The Conversation, Frankel says photos and other artistic representations can make heady scientific concepts more accessible to everyday people; they offer a “language” folks are familiar with. Take the recent snapshot of Messier 87, the first black hole to be captured by photograph, which showed — in electrifying orange — how light bends around the terrifying gravity of the object’s event horizon. You might “take notice of color, for example, and wonder if it suggests meaning — why is that black hole orange?” Frankel writes. “I bet you know how to ask questions about a photograph.”
Worth a thousand words: Also a science photographer, Frankel recently released a book, “Picturing Science and Engineering,” that explains how images can bridge the gap between experts and amateurs. Seeking to show just how narrow that gap can be, she offers the example of a fabricated material created by her colleague at MIT to emulate sea otter fur — “for the purpose of studying insulation.” Lying flat and photographed from above, it has all the intrigue of an engine air filter. But bent, well-lighted, and captured at an angle? It suggests all the possibilities that scientific research has to offer.
Check it out here, along with other examples at the intersection of art and science. We at GE Reports are definitely paying attention.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“They have big hearts and they are caring. They want to use their math and science and STEM skills to have an impact on the world.”
— Jessica Hughes, teacher at Cincinnati’s Hyde Park School
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.
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