For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. The broad-spectrum drugs often prescribed for gut flare-ups can kill helpful microbes alongside harmful ones, sometimes worsening symptoms over time. When fighting gut inflammation, you don’t always want to bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight.

Annotating regions of interest in medical images, a process known as segmentation, is often one of the first steps clinical researchers take when running a new study involving biomedical images.

For pregnant women, ultrasounds are an informative (and sometimes necessary) procedure. They typically produce two-dimensional black-and-white scans of fetuses that can reveal key insights, including biological sex, approximate size, and abnormalities like heart issues or cleft lip. If your doctor wants a closer look, they may use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses magnetic fields to capture images that can be combined to create a 3D view of the fetus.

3D printing has come a long way since its invention in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who pioneered stereolithography, a technique that solidifies liquid resin into solid objects using ultraviolet lasers. Over the decades, 3D printers have evolved from experimental curiosities into tools capable of producing everything from custom prosthetics to complex food designs, architectural models, and even functioning human organs. 

Most people recognize Alzheimer’s from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now a sweeping new study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes..  The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.

Every year, global health experts are faced with a high-stakes decision: which flu strains should go into the next seasonal vaccine? The choice must be made months in advance, long before flu season even begins, and it can often feel like a race against the clock. If the selected strains match those that circulate, the vaccine will likely be highly effective. But if the prediction is off, protection can drop significantly, leading to (potentially preventable) illness and strain on healthcare systems.