cancer

Facebook has clarified its policy against nudity to allow for postmastectomy photos after a run-in with vocal breast cancer awareness advocates disgruntled by the social network's practice of removing photos depicting mastectomy scars.

In May, Scorchy Barrington, a woman with Stage IV breast cancer, petitioned Facebook executives through Change.org to end the company's practice of censoring photos of men and women who have undergone mastectomies. Barrington said Facebook was removing photos from the SCAR Project Page, which features photographs of young breast cancer survivors, and that Facebook had banned project founder and photographer David Jay from the … Read more

Kids dealing with cancer at the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, are getting a slightly different kind of cancer-fighting treatment. The medicine is the same, but the delivery method carries a superheroic message. The IV fluid is now covered with superhero logos created by advertising agency JWT Brazil.

Warner Brothers (owner of DC Comics) is also a client of JWT and gave its blessing and a helping hand to the project that features Green Lantern, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. The kids are given custom comic books and animations that show the popular superheroes undergoing similar treatments. The superheroes recover thanks to the "superformula" and continue in their crime-fighting ways.… Read more

A researcher who used to work in digital television has just led a team of Columbia University engineers to win the Sage Bionetworks / DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge.

Dimitris Anastassiou, who is now a systems biologist (meaning he investigates interactions within biological systems), reports in the April 17 issue of Science Translational Medicine that his team's winning computation model is extremely predictive of breast cancer survival.

Before the challenge, Anastassiou and his team identified what they call "attractor metagenes," which are genetic signatures expressed in almost the exact same way across many types of cancer. Their new … Read more

With lung cancer being the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the U.S., effective early screening is key to saving lives. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic say they've developed new software that can help classify lung nodules noninvasively, saving lives and health care costs.

A pilot study of the program called Computer-aided Nodule Assessment and Risk Yield, or Canary, appears in the April issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Canary leans on data from high-resolution CT images of a common type of cancerous nodule in the lung called pulmonary adenocarcinomas. It matches every pixel of the lung image to one of nine unique radiological exemplars. In the pilot study, it was able to classify the lesions as aggressive or indolent with high sensitivity, as compared to microscopic analyses of the lesions after being surgically removed and analyzed by lung pathologists.… Read more

Our body tissue, not to mention diseases, each have their own unique "fingerprint," which can in turn be examined to diagnose various health issues at very early stages.

Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say that after a decade of work they've developed a new MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) technique that can scan for those diseases very quickly. In just 12 seconds, for instance, it may be possible to differentiate white from gray matter in cerebrospinal fluid in the brain; in a matter of minutes, a full-body scan would provide far more data, making diagnostics considerably easier and less expensive than today's scans.… Read more

An electrical engineer at Stanford has led the effort to develop an endoscope that is not only as thin as a human hair but also boasts a resolution four times better than existing ultrathin models. The "micro-endoscope" could lead to far less invasive bio-imaging, making it easier and safer to peer inside living organs and tissue to, say, study the brain and detect cancer.

The researchers, led by Joseph Kahn at the Stanford School of Engineering, report in the journal Optics Express and the Optical Society of America's Spotlight in Optics that the prototype can resolve objects … Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

When a patient asked Laura Ferris, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, her opinion on smartphone apps that purport to distinguish between benign and malignant skin lesions, Ferris realized she'd never used one and decided to run images of melanomas through a few of the apps herself.

"When I saw the first few results come back of them being missed, I really started to get concerned," Ferris says in a school video. So she decided to investigate further, and reports this week in JAMA Dermatology that three out of four … Read more

Sometimes it's easy to forget the incredible social power of the Internet, but this story about director J.J. Abrams granting a dying man's "Star Trek" wish serves as a great reminder.

Last week on popular link-sharing site Reddit, a user named ideeeyut described how his 41-year-old friend Daniel -- a Manhattan man who has been afflicted with leukemia, another unrelated cancer, and additional health problems -- wanted to see the latest "Star Trek Into Darkness" movie but may not have the chance.

To get a taste of the upcoming sci-fi epic before his … Read more