Teller, Eades Share Exciting Medical Advancements During College Hour

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Laurie Teller, clinical associate professor of telehealth, Susan Eades, department head of Large Animal Clinical Sciences, shared on Jan. 25 some of the exciting research and technology that is working to advance medicine with College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM) faculty, staff, and administrators during the first College Hour presentation of the semester.

Teller and Eades learned about these advances during the Exponential Medicine Conference, and, while they largely pertained to human medicine, some of these advances not only translate into animal medicine but represent the future of veterinary medicine.

“The idea behind this meeting is to bring these minds together to leverage the rapidly changing technological advances in healthcare and target global challenges across health,” Teller said. “There were only five veterinarians at this meeting, but we’re getting their attention, too.

“There are a lot of high-risk ideas out there. Many will succeed. Some will not,” she said. “But we need to come together and work through those so that we can determine what will work best to advance health care for both humans and animals.”

Themes that emerged during the meeting included applications for artificial intelligence (AI), estimated to be a $3 trillion industry by 2030 as it infiltrates sectors ranging from “big pharma” to automotive and health care; quantum computing, used for things such as predictive modeling, in which the Chinese have invested more than $10 billion; block chain technology, used to combat fake medication by tracking everything from the origin of production, to where it is dispensed, to the patient; and wearables with EKG and MRI technology that can track health problems.

Some of these technologies will be trickling down into the veterinary medicine world, Teller said.

Most directly applicable was a presentation on telemedicine, which Teller and the CVM’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital is working to integrate.

Jay Parkinson, who is very active in the telemedicine realm–having done 900 virtual care visits, alone—talked about some of the differences between synchronous and asynchronous telemedicine cases,” she said. “As Texas A&M start embracing telemedicine and incorporating it into what we do, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of these will help us work our way through some of the hiccups a little bit easier.”

Synchronous visits take place in real time; these are linear, like when you visit your doctor in real time. Challenges here include the need for documentation, the difficulty of standardizing communications, and that it can be time-consuming.

Asynchronous visits can be more efficient because they are not in real time; a client may give you information to which you respond when you can, creating a back-and-forth rapport.

“What Dr. Parkinson has discovered is that 95 percent of the problems for 80 percent of the people in America could be exclusively handled without in-person visits,” Teller said. “They could almost all be handled with asynchronous technology, and you can certainly convert that to a video visit or in person visit, as needed.

“The biggest thing, and we’re seeing this on the veterinary side, too, is it’s really about the relationship between the doctor or the veterinarian and the patient or the client,” she said. “Because telemedicine is really just another form of two people communicating and trying to improve healthcare for themselves or their animals.”

Other “things to pay attention to” were a 3-D medication printer that creates customized medications by fusing all medications into one pill; Alexa-type devices that can improve product quality control and managing tasks in surgical suites; machine learning that can schedule appointments or assess efficiency by measuring how long procedures take; and AI-based applications that can analyze radiographs, augmenting current systems by identifying and alerting radiologists to things that current technology cannot.

Virtual reality will have a massive impact on how students can be trained for surgical procedures; imaging equipment producing scans using infrared light and ultrasound waves has the potential to create new wearable MRIs; 3D printing can create bone scaffolds; and robotic surgery can increase the number of surgeries that can be done by reducing surgical times. Additionally, drug therapies are being developed that will fuse molecular biology and engineering to use a patient’s own cells to remove cancer cells and other therapies are being developed that incorporate genomics.

An app produced by a company called Nora, which will work to link patients to clinical trials as a means of advertising and enrolling patients, was especially interesting to Eades.

“It centers on predictive modeling. The company basically took 20 years of longitudinal data from a medical records system from 4.5 million people and was developing predictive modeling for various diseases and outcomes associated with that data,” Eades said. “Using basically healthy clients, they used machine learning to predictively analyze these people, and, significantly, they found they could predict catastrophic disease in 40 percent of the clients. The idea was that if you predict the disease, you develop a plan to intercede earlier and avoid catastrophic illness.”

Because there is a push for a more patient-centered approach to medicine, Eades said a big focus was on transparency and trust.

“The end user, the patient, has to understand what the artificial intelligence is doing, how it’s being used, and be able to trust the results,” she said. “There were a lot of talks about trends and how we need to manage those trends, managing the good with the bad. It ties to the idea that with all of the data we can generate and all of the data we have, we would be the governors of how that data was used.”

While many challenges will emerge as these advances in veterinary medicine technology continue to arise, ensuring that the CVM can keep up with be key.

“It behooves us to be on top of it because we do need to be the innovators and the people pushing ourselves forward,” she said. “But we can also do it ethically and collaboratively.”

At the end, Teller announced that one of the speakers, Dr. Daniel Kraft, who founded the Exponential Medicine Conference, will appear at the CVM’s Veterinary Innovation Summit in April and encouraged all to hear his talk.


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