In today’s Roundup: AI meets the final frontier; mind-boggling abuse of peer review; using machine learning to spot disease outbreaks; new clue for Kryptos; dodgy stem-cell clinics proliferate; latest on coronavirus; malicious hacking for digital health data; why aren’t patients enrolling in cancer clinical trials?; sun gets a close-up; closing biotech’s gender gap; scores of genes associated with autism development; Avast promises its click-harvesting will walk the plank; much more:

AI, Statistics & Data Science

Kryptos. Image credit:  Jim Sanborn via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

• These items constitute grazing a bit beyond our usual pastures, but a pair of recent articles in Acta Astronautica caught our eye recently. The first, by Gabriel De La Torre, reports on a project that explored the usefulness of using artificial intelligence to look for “technosignatures” of intelligent extraterrestrial life as part of the SETI project and found that while AI applications have substantial potential in this role, they are also capable of seeing things that aren’t strictly there. The other, a paper by Cheng and colleagues, explores the possible use of deep neural nets to make decisions that could fine-tune automated landings of deep-space probes in situations where humans are effectively removed from the “driver’s seat” by the lightspeed time lag created by extreme distances.
• “The more we are focusing our intervention efforts, identifying cases as soon as possible and quarantining those cases, the better chance we have of limiting the global impact of this virus.” STAT News’ Casey Ross quotes John Brownstein, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, who is among the researchers and scientists who are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict, monitor and respond to the international coronavirus outbreak that has recently been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (H/T @erbrod).
• Kryptos, a mysterious sculpture by sculptor Jim Sanborn erected in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, is covered with an encrypted message that in the three decades since it was created has yet to be cracked, despite the unrelenting efforts of cryptography enthusiasts. In an interactive new feature, New York Times’ John Schwartz and Jonathan Corum signal to a new bright light on the horizon for Kryptos enthusiasts around the world as Sanborn offers a new clue: “NORTHEAST.”    
• A deep learning imagining analysis tool developed by Ghorbani and colleagues showed mixed results at identifying cardiac structures and functions, according to a new publication in Nature Digital Medicine (H/T @NHLBI_Translate).  
• A study published in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics by Baptista and colleagues provides a comprehensive critical review of recent research that has employed deep learning methods to predict drug response in cancer cell lines and patients to novel drugs or drug combinations, while highlighting ways these studies can be improved upon.
• In a recent tweetorial, Duke Institute for Health Innovation’s Mark Sendak shares key findings from a recently published paper in the European Medical Journal Innovations where him and colleagues review 21 different machine learning applications and their diverse uses in modern healthcare across various geographic populations and clinical domains. 
• Using data mined from social media conversations, developers at Google have created a new chat bot called Meena, whose conversational ability shows improvement relative to previous iterations – although there are some occasional swerves. Their findings were recently published in a preprint available from arXiv (H/T @BayKenney). 

Basic Science, Clinical Research & Public Health

• A new analysis by Kolak and colleagues published in JAMA provides a granular (and potentially more useful) look at multifarious variations in the social determinants of health is US neighborhoods (H/T @califf001).
• Some good news: after years of continuous declines, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that overall life expectancy in the United States rose slightly in 2018, an improvement largely driven by declines in the rate of drug overdose deaths.
•  “…there is evidence that human-to-human transmission has occurred among close contacts since the middle of December 2019. Considerable efforts to reduce transmission will be required to control outbreaks if similar dynamics apply elsewhere. Measures to prevent or reduce transmission should be implemented in populations at risk.” An early report on the characteristics and dynamics of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China has been published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine by Li and colleagues.
• Following up on the Science organoids study from the previous Roundup, a team of UCSF scientists has recently published new findings from their study of these lab-grown organoids developed from human cortical cells in Nature that show organoids might not be as “reliable” as previously thought, especially when compared to the developing human brain.
• A recent study by Tran and colleagues published in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics brings to light the various organizational hurdles that reduce opportunities for cancer patients to be enrolled in clinical trials. Using clinicaltrials.gov data, the researchers found the ratio of patients vs available clinical trial slots to be a surprising 13 to 1.   
• “Stem cells sold at clinics are driving what’s thought to be a $2 billion global industry. Facebook pages announce seminars. Local newspapers are wrapped in ads vowing “relief without surgery.” Stem cells are billed as treatments for everything from autism to multiple sclerosis to baldness. None of the treatments advertised have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” Science News’ Laura Beil highlights how for-profit stem cell clinics use dubious research to market and hype their unproven products and falsely suggest endorsement or approval by federal agencies, without any real focus on patient safety.
• “When a new disease emerges, health organizations turn to a seemingly simple number to gauge whether the outbreak will spread. It’s called the basic reproduction number—R0, pronounced R-nought—and though useful for decision makers, it’s a nightmare for public communication.” The Atlantic’s Ed Yong breaks down the complexities of a metric used to gauge the threat posed by a new disease – and why widespread misinterpretation of its import is causing problems.
• More than a hundred genes have been implicated in the development of autism spectrum disorders by researchers in a large-scale study published recently in Cell.
• A new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine by King and colleagues examines patterns in how hospitals and healthcare systems tolerate or restrict pharmaceutical “detailing” activities by industry sales representatives.
• “The difficulty of fixing blatant mistakes in academic publications threatens not only the advancement of science but also the promise of evidence-based policymaking. If scientific journals fail to label mathematically flawed assertions as wrong, opting instead to equivocate, the general public cannot be blamed for basing its opinions on false premises.” In an opinion for The Washington Post, Princeton University’s Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo share a coauthored letter published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in response to a widely covered study of 900 fatal police shootings published in the same journal last year, concluding that “White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers” – findings that the authors find glaringly flawed and statistically inaccurate in their reasoning.
  
  

  High-resolution image of the solar surface, showing granulation and convection cells. Image credit: NSO/AURA/NSF
• Researchers from Novartis and Harvard provide a historical perspective on the “hypothesis” as a concept that evolved as part of the development of the scientific method in Western Europe in an essay for Cell (H/T @f2harrrell).
• Behold the highest-resolution image of the sun’s surface ever taken, courtesy of the four-meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) run by the National Science Foundation in the U.S. in Hawaii, part of a series of new solar missions to study the sun more closely by NASA scientists. Scientific American’s Jonathan O'Callaghan provides the details in a new feature.

Communications & Digital Society

• “Although I didn't get to work with him… [his] journey is certainly inspirational and helped comfort me in recognizing that I was part of a larger journey in terms of diversifying the medical profession.” At The Duke Chronicle, John Markis Damon Tweedy, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and reports on the Duke Medical Center archives obtaining an all-encompassing collection of writings by Duke University Medical Center’s first African American surgeon Onyekwere Akwari, that provide a rare and valuable window into the progression of African Americans and immigrants in medicine.
• A report from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center explores the risks of cyberattacks on digital health information, particularly “…threats that involve a state actor hacking, deleting, and changing health data in these systems.”
• Vice reports that the company that manufactures Avast antivirus software has pledged to stop harvesting and selling highly sensitive customer data in the wake of earlier reports that shed light on the practice.
• A case study of reviewer misconduct in the Journal of Theoretical Biology contains multiple jaw-dropping instances of dishonesty, deception, manipulation, self-aggrandizement, and radioactive levels of chutzpah – including a virtually assembly-line approach to citation inflation engineered by a rogue reviewer, who among other abuses demanded that hapless authors undergoing review cite scores of the reviewer’s own publications (whether remotely relevant or not).
• CNN’s Michelle Toh reports on social media companies scrambling to tamp down the spread of wild rumors and bogus “cures” amid the coronavirus outbreak.
•  “It could be helpful to people who make investment decisions to have more diversity in the room. But allocators of capital tend to invest in people who are like them, and most people who make investment decisions are men. Unless that changes, women who catch the entrepreneurial bug will continue to face implicit bias from funders.” STAT News’ Sharon Begley shares the story of three superstar Massachusetts Institute of Technology female scientists – Sangeeta Bhatia, Susan Hockfield, and Nancy Hopkins – who are trying to bridge the gender divide in biotech through their mutually formed Boston Biotech Working Group. 
•  “It’s easy to lose sight of initial goals when follower count and engagement increases.” In a recent tweetorial, USC’s social media specialist Sarah Mojarad probes the definition of “success” on social media for physicians and other clinicians, and suggests that pursuing a strategy of simply maximizing follower metrics may miss the point of the exercise.
• This is probably timely, given that there’s supposedly some big football game or other happening this weekend: for their startup Protect3d that specializes in custom athletic protective devices for athletes using 3D technology, former Duke football lettermen Clark Bulleit, Kevin Gehsmann, and Tim Skapek have been chosen as finalists for the fifth annual National Football League 1st and Future innovations competition that awards and promotes innovations in player health, safety and performance (H/T @DukeResearch).

Policy

• NPR’s Shots Blog has a rundown of the implications of the announcement on Thursday of the Trump Administration’s plans to permit states to adopt a (don’t call it a) block-grant approach to Medicaid funding.
• “Calling for better diets and more exercise as solutions [to high healthcare spending], even if they worked, has classist and racist undertones. People who have low-incomes will not have the resources to purchase the food a nutritionist would recommend, and they may not have the time to go to the gym if they are balancing multiple jobs and families. People of color disproportionately face these structural barriers.” In a post for Drivers of Health, Carmen Mitchell deconstructs the unfounded assumptions underlying a Christmas Eve tweetorial by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
• “If we spend more money in the U.S. than other places but we don’t use more care, then we must be paying more for that care.” At Forbes, Duke’s Peter Ubel gives his two cents on the high healthcare prices in the Unites States.
• “Courts have recognized that the very loss of control over this highly sensitive, highly personal information itself causes harm to people… Tech firms and other companies that collect biometric data must be very nervous right now.” New York Times’ Natasha Singer and Mike Isaac report on social media giant Facebook paying a whopping $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Illinois users by various privacy groups over the platform’s use of facial recognition technology, raising further concerns over the company’s privacy ethics and practices.
• The House of Representatives Committee on Ethics has recently released a memorandum admonishing members of the US House of Representatives to refrain from “intentionally” sharing “audio-visual distortions” or deepfakes on social media lest they face sanctions from the House itself. The memorandum notes that deepfakes can erode public trust, affect public discourse, and even “sway an election,” and that members of the House who mislead the public through deepfakes or other audio-visual distortions will be in direct violation of the Code of Official Conduct of the House (H/T @b_fung).