Making Medicine “Smarter”

As much as patients would like for the word “doctor” to mean “all-knowing,” unfortunately, this will never be the case. Human fallibility on the part of medical professionals sometimes leads to devastating misdiagnoses that can result in additional suffering, or even death, for their patients. But there is hope for better, more accurate medical diagnoses through the development of new technologies, and one Florida State University researcher is putting her engineering knowledge to work to develop tools for more accurately diagnosing breast cancer. Anke Meyer-Baese is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Florida A&M University-FSU College of Engineering. Her work focuses on electrical and computer engineering, with a specialization in methods of artificial intelligence that can be applied to medical imaging. Meyer-Baese recently became the first College of Engineering faculty member to receive a National Institutes of Health Career Award, which comes with $695,000 in research funding. With the money, she will lead a five-year project to give doctors a new tool to better diagnose breast cancer. The aggressive disease claims the lives of more than 40,000 American women each year -- so a diagnostic tool that will allow patients to begin a course of treatment as early as possible is urgently needed.