Despite more donors, barriers remain in stem cell transplantation

Healio spoke with Albert C. Yeh, MD, about a couple key themes from this year’s Tandem Meetings | Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT and CIBMTR.
“In general, there’s an increase in the use of transplants because of the availability of donors, but at the same time we still lag behind in terms of, ‘How do we get equal access to everyone?’” Yeh, physician and research associate of translational science and therapeutics at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and acting assistant professor at University of Washington School of Medicine, said.

AI reads clinical notes to forecast colitis-linked colorectal cancer

People with ulcerative colitis (UC), a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, are up to four times more likely to develop colorectal cancer than the general population. Low-grade dysplasia (LGD)—abnormal or precancerous lesions—can be an early warning sign, but only a fraction of UC-LGD cases progress to cancer. This makes it challenging for clinicians and patients to make informed care decisions, ranging from continued surveillance to preventative surgery.

MRI antenna can boost image quality and shorten scan times—without changing existing machines

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of medicine's most powerful diagnostic tools. But certain tissues deep inside the body—including brain regions and delicate structures of the eye and orbit that are of particular relevance for ophthalmology—are difficult to image clearly. The problem is not the scanner itself, but the hardware that sends and receives radio signals.