Datathons and Software to Promote Reproducible Research.

Background: Datathons facilitate collaboration between clinicians, statisticians, and data scientists in order to answer important clinical questions. Previous datathons have resulted in numerous publications of interest to the critical care community and serve as a viable model for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Objective: We report on an open-source software called Chatto that was created by members of our group, in the context of the second international Critical Care Datathon, held in September 2015.

Making big data useful for health care: a summary of the inaugural mit critical data conference.

With growing concerns that big data will only augment the problem of unreliable research, the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized the Critical Data Conference in January 2014. Thought leaders from academia, government, and industry across disciplines-including clinical medicine, computer science, public health, informatics, biomedical research, health technology, statistics, and epidemiology-gathered and discussed the pitfalls and challenges of big data in health care. The key message from the conference is that the value of large amounts of data hinges on the ability of researchers to share data, methodologies, and findings in an open setting.

Crowdsourcing knowledge discovery and innovations in medicine.

Clinicians face difficult treatment decisions in contexts that are not well addressed by available evidence as formulated based on research. The digitization of medicine provides an opportunity for clinicians to collaborate with researchers and data scientists on solutions to previously ambiguous and seemingly insolvable questions. But these groups tend to work in isolated environments, and do not communicate or interact effectively.

From Pharmacovigilance to Clinical Care Optimization.

In order to ensure the continued, safe administration of pharmaceuticals, particularly those agents that have been recently introduced into the market, there is a need for improved surveillance after product release. This is particularly so because drugs are used by a variety of patients whose particular characteristics may not have been fully captured in the original market approval studies. Even well-conducted, randomized controlled trials are likely to have excluded a large proportion of individuals because of any number of issues.

Rare breast lesions: correlation of imaging and histologic features with WHO classification.

Mammographers occasionally are surprised by the diagnosis of a rare lesion at breast biopsy. The imaging features of some breast lesions are unfamiliar because they are rarely seen in routine mammographic practice and they are not well described or well documented in the radiologic literature. Moreover, there may be wide variation in the appearances of rare breast lesions at mammography and ultrasonography (US).

Diffusion-weighted imaging, apparent diffusion coefficients, and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery MR imaging in endophthalmitis.

We describe the appearance of endogenous bacterial endophthalmitis in a patient who underwent MR imaging of the orbits before and during the course of treatment. Intraocular hyperintensity on fluid-attenuated inversion recovery and diffusion-weighted images were found very useful for diagnosing endophthalmitis. After a few days of treatment, a marked relative increase in intraocular mean apparent diffusion coefficient values was observed, which appears to indicate good treatment response.