GoKawiil
Tech News
A commentary on engineering practice describes how AI tools now let engineers research standards, generate design options, and run simulations early in a project, tasks once requiring several specialists. The author argues this shifts the engineer's role from executing technical steps to coordinating people, machines, and expert knowledge, while final decisions still rest with humans.
Biomedical engineering is reported to be experiencing rapid growth as an academic and research discipline. Despite this expansion, observers are raising questions about whether the growth is translating into tangible benefits for patients.
The US Food and Drug Administration has published a discussion paper inviting feedback on how to regulate generative-AI-enabled medical devices, with submissions due by a set deadline. The move comes as thousands of studies on AI tools in clinical medicine are published yearly and more than 230 million people weekly ask chatbots health-related questions.
MIT researchers led by Giovanni Traverso developed a battery coated in a rice-paper-like material that can power swallowable medical devices and then be fully broken down and absorbed by the body. The team tested the battery in pigs by powering an RFID tag that transmits data from inside the body and a device that electrically stimulates the stomach to release hunger-regulating hormones. The work, published in Nature Chemical Engineering, replaces toxic metals, organic electrolytes and plastic casings found in conventional batteries with non-toxic alternatives like magnesium and molybdenum.
Britain's medicines regulator, the MHRA, has published 44 recommendations for overseeing artificial intelligence tools used in healthcare, following input from over 12,000 patients and clinicians. The proposals include ongoing monitoring of AI systems, patient rights to know when AI is used in their care, penalties for developers whose products underperform, and a supervised 'L plate' trial phase for new AI tools.
Boston Scientific disclosed in an SEC filing that a cyberattack beginning Tuesday has caused widespread outages across its IT systems, hampering its ability to ship and process orders. The medical device maker, which serves roughly 48 million patients annually, has not said whether implanted devices like pacemakers are affected, and has not given a timeline for restoring systems. Reports from Ireland indicate staff at its Cork campus were sent home after internal network communications went down.
Boston Scientific detected a cybersecurity incident on August 25 that knocked out access to key IT systems and business applications, halting its ability to process and ship customer orders worldwide. The medical device maker has activated incident response protocols and hired outside cybersecurity experts to investigate and contain the breach, but has not given a timeline for full restoration. In its SEC filing, the company did not disclose details about the attack type, the perpetrators, or whether any data was compromised.
Nearly a decade after Geoffrey Hinton predicted AI would replace radiologists, the profession has instead grown, with practitioner numbers projected to rise more than 26% over three decades. About three-quarters of the 1,400 AI-enabled medical devices cleared by the FDA target radiology, ranging from tools that draft reports and flag urgent cases to systems that can spot abnormalities humans miss, such as AI-assisted colonoscopies detecting more polyps than standard procedures.