News

Researchers at Johns Hopkins APL are working on a proof of concept for a conversational artificial intelligence agent that will be able to provide medical guidance to untrained soldiers in plain English, by applying knowledge gleaned from established care procedures.

A collaboration between Johns Hopkins APL and Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore is applying data science expertise to combat preventable harms in the health care system, using the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform.

Johns Hopkins APL researchers are exploring how new capabilities in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and robotics might support collaborative intervention by teams of medics, AI-based virtual assistants and autonomous robots.

Spinal cord injuries are among the most devastating that a person can live with — as well as the most difficult to effectively treat. Johns Hopkins APL researchers are applying machine-learning techniques to enable existing technology to help restore autonomy and dignity to people who live with spinal cord injuries.

Future disease outbreaks aren’t probable, they’re inevitable. To prepare for those situations, researchers at APL are leveraging more than 30 years of public health and data analysis experience to develop strategies and tools that will best enable effective decision-making for outbreak response.

Johns Hopkins APL is working with the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop a software application to help first responders and decision-makers stay up to date during national emergencies.

Through the Disaster Response Corps, APL is bringing its world-class expertise in data analytics, remote sensing, systems engineering and other relevant disciplines to monitor damaged medical infrastructure in Ukraine.

Barry Grabow has been named mission area executive for Johns Hopkins APL’s National Health Mission Area, formally occupying a role he has held in an acting capacity since August.

To improve the quality of pediatric CPR, immersive technology specialists at APL and pediatric emergency physicians from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center are developing an augmented-reality-based CPR coaching system to be used in community care settings.

Wonder is, by its very nature, impossible to quantify. But, convinced of the fundamental role of wonder in the scientific enterprise, a team from Johns Hopkins Medicine and APL is leveraging the power of data to foster wonder, inspire novel insights and push the frontiers of precision medicine.

APL’s Robert Stoll has received a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate 2021 William Deso Excellence in Program Management Award for his work on biothreat challenges.

Scientists at APL have created a foolproof, accurate, on-the-spot test for detecting RNA viruses that uses mature, off-the-shelf technology.

Genomics work has historically been the province of small, highly specialized laboratories with access to top-of-the-line hardware, infrastructure support and technical expertise. Now, a software platform developed largely by APL is making advanced genomics tools accessible and user-friendly for scientists and public health workers around the world.

As COVID-19 cases multiplied in early 2020, so too did the number of users turning to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard, which tracked global cases of COVID-19 in real time and quickly became the go-to source for the public, the news media and even the U.S. government. But the system’s early infrastructure buckled under the sheer proliferation of data as cases continued to explode worldwide. This is the story of how the most trusted, accurate source of information available on the pandemic came to be, and how it became the data source relied upon globally for near-real-time tracking of the biggest health crisis this century.

Sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, APL is collaborating with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality on a study to characterize and analyze the airborne transmission of infectious agents in hospital settings — with the goal of reducing risks to frontline health care workers and patients.

Three principal investigators from APL were among researchers from across the Johns Hopkins enterprise to earn funding in the sixth round of the Johns Hopkins Discovery Awards program.

Johns Hopkins APL researchers are working with Johns Hopkins Medicine and a technology startup to explore the use of Bluetooth Low Energy beacons with ultra-wideband capabilities to study the ability of health care workers to maintain safe distances from one another.

As the COVID-19 pandemic persists into a second year and conducting disease surveillance continues to be an important component of public health responses, APL has entered into an agreement with InductiveHealth Informatics to facilitate access by additional state and local governments to the APL-developed Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics, or ESSENCE.

APL is partnering with the Howard County Government to develop a study that will determine SARS-CoV-2 antibody prevalence in the county population. The APL-led study will leverage the Laboratory’s expertise in health surveillance and data science to help provide Howard County leadership with a clearer picture of the virus’ spread through the county population.

Time named the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center to its list of 2020 Best Inventions, calling it “2020’s Go-To Data Source.” Researchers at Johns Hopkins APL provide essential data collection, curation and aggregation for the site, which delivers the most accurate information available on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event summary for the second annual National Health Symposium, organized by APL, is now available.

In a paper recently published by Military Medicine, APL’s Adam Cohen and Sarah Herman join several co-authors to summarize the major concepts discussed at a gathering of military surgeons and propose a more effective approach to prolonged field care research.

APL is leading the development of a technical framework to guide organizations and industry in developing interoperable, safe, effective and secure medical systems that will deliver the next generation of medical care, in addition to providing a framework for implementing remote and autonomous care where appropriate.

Researchers at APL are collaborating with radiologists from Johns Hopkins Medicine to develop an upstream data fusion (UDF) method — leveraging artificial intelligence — that promises to significantly improve the accuracy of breast cancer screening.

M. Khair ElZarrad, the Deputy Director of the Office of Medical Policy in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, will be the featured speaker in the July installment of APL’s National Health Virtual Speaker Series.

Experts from across the Johns Hopkins enterprise gathered virtually on March 25 to discuss ways to address the projected shortfall in ventilators required during an anticipated surge of critically ill COVID-19 patients.

This event will bring together partners in the community — federal government, Department of Defense, academia and industry — to explore the role of AI in real-world health care settings.

George Coles, a medical-device researcher at Johns Hopkins APL, is part of a team that has developed a handheld device that allows surgeons to quickly and inexpensively perform sight-saving cataract surgery.

As the world grapples with COVID-19, and the United States works to ramp up testing and mitigation capabilities, a public health electronic surveillance tool developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is helping to fill gaps by tracking the virus’ spread symptomatically.

Every year, millions of patients receive medical diagnoses, care and treatment plans based on algorithms. But a recent study finding a lack of ethnic diversity in the source data for one widely used treatment-decision algorithm has researchers suggesting that similar tools used by hospitals, health care systems and government agencies could be doing more harm than good.

On April 21–22, 2020, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is hosting its second annual National Health Symposium.

The official event summary for the inaugural National Health Symposium, held March 5–6 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, is available.

Much has been written recently about the success of artificial intelligence and deep learning systems in accurately detecting and diagnosing ocular diseases, and research results of new applications are being published with increasing frequency. But less is known about the practical considerations for actually clinically deploying DL algorithms for medical imaging.

Despite the common wisdom that more is always better, when it comes to finding reliable health information in the digital age, that adage has mostly led to a crowded, unregulated and confusing place.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins Medicine have launched the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform (PMAP), a new data analytics tool that will facilitate big-data research across the JHU enterprise and enable clinicians to make discoveries and improve their patient care.

In 2017, U.S. health care spending increased 3.9 percent to $3.5 trillion — close to 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. But more isn’t always good; this growth has broad negative impacts on federal, state and local budgets, as well as on employers and individuals.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is taking its health surveillance expertise to the 2019 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, set for March 8–17 in Austin, Texas.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will host “Bridging the Health Divide: From Research to Operations,” an inaugural National Health Symposium, held in partnership with the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) on March 5–6, 2019

Leading digital health companies have not yet demonstrated substantial impact on disease burden or cost in the U.S. health care system, according to a new study published in the January issue of Health Affairs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly 1 million healthcare associated infections (HAIs) occur annually, and many of the approximately 100,000 associated deaths occur in patients with compromised immune systems. While there are signs of a downward trend in this infection rate as hospitals adopt new protocols, these infections continue to represent a significant — and preventable — burden.

While health care has made great strides in recent years with the proliferation of electronic health records (EHRs), interoperability among health care technologies remains very limited, says a new National Academy of Medicine (NAM) special publication, co-chaired by Johns Hopkins APL National Health Mission Area (NHMA) Executive Sezin Palmer, patient safety advocate Peter Pronovost and Michael M. E. Johns of Emory University’s schools of Medicine and Public Health.

A new study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (SOM) and Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will combine research into navigational planning in brains with autonomous robotic swarms to drive advances in both fields.

Health systems engineers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are working with the Navy to expand the role of Navy hospital corpsmen stateside and improve access to medical care for military members through a pilot program called Connected Corpsmen in the Community (CCC).

When a natural disaster strikes, government agencies quickly activate a decentralized and often disparate network of response teams to collect, analyze and operationalize all types of data and information. However, current data-management strategies and traditional epidemiological methods are not well-equipped to deal with the growing complexities of today’s disaster landscape.

The advent of electronic medical records with large image databases, along with advances in artificial intelligence with deep learning, is offering medical professionals new opportunities to dramatically improve image analysis and disease diagnostics.

Engineers and scientists from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will discuss their innovative work on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and health care technology advances at 2018’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, held March 9–18 in Austin, Texas.

A recent study by biological engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, demonstrated a significant advancement in the preservation of particular types of medicines, known as protein expression systems, for field applications — enabling those medicines to be stored and reconstituted on site in adverse conditions.

For the past decade, APL has led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) Program, and in the process created the most advanced neurally controlled prosthetic limb in the world. Using this technology, patients whose bodies are paralyzed have been able to feed themselves, reached out to loved ones and even control a flight simulator.

Nearly two years have passed since the deadly outbreak of Ebola in Liberia began to taper off, but the root causes of the epidemic — dilapidated health facilities, shortages of staff and equipment, and fractured trust in the system — persist.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have mapped the movements of a simulated pathogen through a medical biocontainment facility, taking a critical first step in developing protocols to prevent the spread of infectious disease and protect hospital patients and caregivers.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, today announced a joint effort to apply rigorous data analysis and systems engineering practices in an effort to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop image analysis and machine-learning tools to detect age-related macular degeneration.

Shunts are the most common form of treatment for hydrocephalus, the excess fluid buildup in the ventricles of the brain.

This fall, about 2,000 juniors and seniors from high schools across Maryland will have the opportunity to help the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., process hundreds of thousands of high-resolution brain tissue images to create a picture of how the cortex — the outer part of the brain where most cognitive processes are thought to occur — is wired at a single neuron level.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will partner with the Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM) Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to design, implement and deploy an integrated set of interventions to reduce medical errors in intensive care units.