Surgery/Specialties 
The concept of the hybrid OR was born in the 1990s, but healthcare institutions were originally slow to adopt the model due, in part, to the initial sizable investment required. While there was a steady uptick in adoption around 2008, today there are still only some 100 hybrid ORs in…
Editor's Note A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by researchers at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai could help doctors better understand which patients are at greatest risk of dying following surgery, according to a December 15 report in Newswise. Based on findings originally published in the Lancet Digital…
Editor’s Note Lending greater weight to patient opinions could help clinicians diagnose certain conditions, according to a study published in Rheumatology on December 18. The study focused specifically on neuropsychiatric lupus, an autoimmune disease that is difficult to diagnose and includes symptoms such as headache, fatigue, and hallucinations that can…
Editor’s Note A new automated delivery system for anesthesia that has been effectively tested in monkeys could eventually be used by doctors to identify and deliver the right dose of drugs in people. The findings appeared October 31 in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United…
Editor’s Note Smartwatches can detect and diagnose irregular heart rhythms in children that standard physician monitoring may miss, Medical Xpress reports. Published on December 13 in Communications Medicine, the findings are based on a survey of 4 years’ worth of electronic medical records for pediatric cardiology patients at Stanford Medicine…
Editor’s Note Penn Medicine celebrated a significant milestone on December 6—its 100th paired kidney exchange surgery in 12 months set a world record for the most kidney paired donation transplants in a year. The announcement was published in an EurekAlert! December 12 press release. Penn Medicine launched its Center for…
Editor's Note Researchers are studying how heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes can be repaired and regenerated to improve functioning and help prevent more serious long-term consequences. The study, titled “Reduced mitochondrial protein translation promotes cardiomyocyte proliferation and heart regeneration,” was published by the journal Circulation—part of the American Heart Association—on…
Editor's Note A new study finds that while opioid prescriptions for postoperative pain relief have continued to decline, that downward trend has slowed since 2020, indicating the need for continued work to right-size opioid prescriptions for surgery patients. The findings were published by JAMA Network on December 7. Researchers looking…
Editor's Note Researchers from Stanford Medicine have found a way to detect which organs in someone’s body are aging at an accelerated rate using a simple blood test. The findings were published in the journal Nature on December 6. This study looked at 5,678 people and found that about one…
Editor's Note An online training program from the University of Birmingham’s Global Surgery Unit, called the EAGLE study, has been shown to reduce major postoperative complications following certain types of colon surgical procedures. The findings were published in the British Journal of Surgery on November 29. Researchers found that surgical…
