3DHEALS, a 3D printing innovation platform, recently brought collaborators from several different specialties together in San Francisco. As founder Hui Jenny Chen, MD, said in her welcoming remarks, "One of the goals of creating this is to see if people from different backgrounds can work together to innovate instead of innovating in a silo." The conference covered the potential and developments of 3D printing, featuring several panels from different specialties, including dentistry, orthopedics, and prosthesis. Chen also noted the significant growth of 3D printing over the past five years, citing the exponential growth of publications related to 3D printing found in PubMed.

Read More

Society's reaction to technological advancement seems to follow a familiar pattern: At first, groundbreaking changes are rejected; the horse and buggy, the train, and the cell phone were all groundbreaking inventions that disquieted society when they were introduced.1 Society's perception of these technologies often changes, however, and many have become staples of everyday life.

Read More

Crowdsourcing is the collaboration of many people with various strengths and skills to solve a problem. It is a common tool that contributes to the rapidly innovative changes seen today. While the earliest knowledge we have of crowdsourcing was in the 1700s with the British government's Longitude Act, more recent examples include Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia that can be freely edited; Linux, an open source operating system; and Waze, a popular GPS navigation app that allows users to contribute content about driving routes, such as the locations of roadblocks and photo-enforced traffic lights.

Read More

Radiologists are experiencing increasing demands to be more efficient with reading images, and this pressure will intensify as health care in the United States shifts to a more value-based model. Demand for image interpretation has increased to the point that a significant number of hospitals are now reportedly outsourcing their images to private firms. Some sources estimate that hospitals outsource more than 90% of their imaging, but, for the in-house radiologists at the hospital, there are still plenty of images to be read. The question becomes, "Why are so many images outsourced, and why can't the radiologists working in the hospital keep up?"

Read More