The ability to detect skin cancer using artificial intelligence (AI) software has rapidly improved. New research presented Wednesday at a medical conference in Berlin shows that this AI technology now has a 100% detection rate for melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. In this study, researchers assessed more than 22,000 patients with suspected skin cancers over 2-1/2 years. Besides detecting all 59 cases of melanoma, the new software was 99.5% accurate in detecting all skin cancers, missing 1 of 190. It was 92.5% effective at identifying pre-cancerous lesions. “This study has demonstrated how AI is rapidly improving and learning, with the high accuracy directly attributable to improvements in AI training techniques and the quality of data used to train the AI,” lead author Dr. Kashini Andrew, specialist registrar at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom, said in a news release from the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. “The latest version of the software has saved over 1,000 face-to-face consultations in the secondary care setting between April 2022 and January 2023, freeing up more time for patients that need urgent attention,” Andrew added. This is the third version of this AI software. The first was tested in 2021, detecting nearly 86% of melanomas, 84% of all skin cancers and 54% of pre-cancerous lesions at that time. Still, the researchers…  read on >  read on >

The ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) program could grow into a source of accurate and comprehensive medical information, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, a new study reports. ChatGPT’s responses to more than 280 medical questions across diverse specialties averaged between mostly to almost completely correct, according to a report published online Oct. 2 in JAMA Network Open. “Overall, it performed fairly well as far as both accuracy and completions,” said senior researcher Dr. Douglas Johnson, director of the Melanoma Clinical Research Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn. “Certainly, it was not perfect. It was not completely reliable,” Johnson continued. “But at the time we were entering the questions, it was actually pretty accurate and provided, relatively speaking, reliable information.” Accuracy improved even more if a second AI program was brought in to review the answer provided by the first, the results showed. Johnson and his colleagues set out to test ChatGPT by peppering the AI with health questions between January and May 2023, shortly after it came online. People and doctors already lean on search engines like Google and Bing for answers to health questions, Johnson said. It makes sense that AI programs like ChatGPT will be the next frontier for researching medical issues. Such AI programs “provide almost an answer engine for many types of questions across different fields,…  read on >  read on >

A popular type of off-road vehicle known as a “side-by-side” has been linked to high rates of severe hand injuries, according to a new study. Side-by-sides are utility terrain vehicles (UTVs) designed to carry more than one passenger and heavy loads. All-terrain vehicles (ATVs) are usually made for one driver going off-road. “Our study finds much higher rates of mutilating hand injuries and amputations associated with side-by-side UTVs, compared to ATVs,” said lead author Dr. Shaun Mendenhall, of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in Philadelphia. Mendenhall worked on the study with colleagues at his former school, the University of Utah. The report was published in the October issue of the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. “We believe hand surgeons can play a key role in increasing awareness and prevention of ATV-related hand injuries,” Mendenhall said in a journal news release. Utility terrain vehicles have side-by-side passenger seating, safety belts and a rollover protection system, but the American Society of Plastic Surgeons suggests this may create a false illusion that UTVs are safer than ATVs. ATVs have straddle seating, no safety belt and no rollover protection. The study developed after University of Utah hand surgeons began seeing more hand, arm and shoulder injuries in UTV riders. Between 2010 and 2021, they treated 87 patients who were injured in ATV accidents and 67 who…  read on >  read on >

TUESDAY, Sept. 26, 2023 (HealthDay News) – The lax enforcement of age limits by many online marijuana dispensaries makes it easier for minors to buy weed, claims new research that looked at online weed sales in 32 states. “It is imperative to require strict age-verification procedures prior to cannabis purchases online and to establish stringent surveillance of online marijuana dispensaries to protect youth,” wrote the authors of the new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The authors looked at age-verification policies and other practices of 80 online dispensaries. About 18.8% of dispensaries “required no formal age verification at any stage of the purchasing process,” according to the study. Meanwhile, more than 80% accepted “non-traceable” payment methods such as pre-paid cards or cash. These polices are “enabling youth to hide their transactions,” the authors noted. The issue, in addition to the law, is about what impact marijuana has on the developing brain, especially as potency of products has increased, the researchers noted. The pandemic saw a drop in marijuana use by minors, possibly because it was harder to get and use the drugs without notice, the New York Times reported. The new study also found that nearly one-third of online dispensaries allowed delivery across state lines. Among those that did, 95% would deliver to states that had different laws than the states they were…  read on >  read on >

Emergency medicine doctors someday might rely on consultation from artificial intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT to help them quickly and accurately diagnose patients’ ailments. A new study found that ChatGPT performed about as well as human doctors in diagnosing patients, when both are given the same set of clinical information. “In the end, they were pretty comparable,” said senior researcher Steef Kurstjens, a clinical chemist with Jeroen Bosch Hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “And as they’re pretty comparable, [AI] might be helpful to speed up the process or enhance the amount of diagnoses at the emergency department.” For the study, two-doctor teams and the artificial intelligence program each reviewed physician’s notes and lab tests for 30 patients treated in March 2022 at the emergency department of Jeroen Bosch Hospital. The researchers used a free version of ChatGPT and a subscriber version. The AI tools and the medical teams then compiled lists of the top five potential diagnoses for each patient, based on the information at hand. Because these were past cases, the researchers already knew what the exact diagnosis had been. Doctors had the correct diagnosis within their top-five list 87% of the time. By comparison, the free version of ChatGPT had the correct diagnosis listed 97% of the time, and the subscriber version of the AI program 87% of the time. “It’s a nice…  read on >  read on >

When some U.S. states made abortion illegal after the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Roe v Wade in June 2022, women in those areas increased their searches for self-managed abortions. To come to that conclusion, researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) analyzed Google search results regarding self-abortion. “We found an increased number of searches in states where abortion had recently become illegal, suggesting that a lot of people in these states are trying to learn how to give themselves abortions instead of going to the doctor,” said lead investigator Sean Young. He is a professor in the departments of emergency medicine and informatics. “This has implications for increased emergency department visits for self-managed abortions in these states,” Young said in a university news release. This could cause increased problems for Black women who already face challenges with accessing quality health care. Black women receive abortions at a higher rate than white women, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Online search results may return unsafe home remedies that could have life-threatening consequences for women who seek to self-manage an abortion,” warned Lidia Flores, from the UCI department of emergency medicine. And Dr. Carrie Chandwani, an associate clinical professor in UCI’s department of emergency medicine, added that “emergency medicine providers need to be prepared for any potential increase in injuries, complications…  read on >  read on >

Emergency room visits for injuries related to driving under the influence of cannabis skyrocketed in Canada after the drug was legalized there, a new study reports. In October 2018, Canada became the second country to nationally legalize recreational or nonmedical cannabis for adult use. While known cannabis-involved emergency department (ED) visits for traffic injuries were still rare, they grew by 475% over 13 years, with a sharper rise in accidents after legalization, the researchers found. “Our findings highlight a concerning increase in cannabis-involvement in traffic-injury emergency visits over time, with even sharper spikes following the phases of legalization and commercialization,” said lead author Dr. Daniel Myran, a post-doctoral trainee at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and a family physician at the Ottawa Hospital. “Conversely, alcohol-involvement in traffic injury ED visits did not increase over the study period, which suggests that legalization of cannabis has played an important role in rising rates,” Myran said in an ICES news release. For the study, the researchers looked at cannabis-involved ED visits for traffic injuries between 2010 and 2021, looking for changes after the October 2018 commercialization of the legal cannabis market, which expanded products and retail stores. The investigators reviewed data from more than 947,000 ED visits for traffic injuries in the province of Ontario. Annual rates of cannabis-involved visits surged from 0.18 visits per 1,000…  read on >  read on >