News by Subject Policy & Ethics

The moral status of research animals with human brain cells, AI and doctoring, data privacy in California, tributes to Dan Callahan, and more in the September-October 2019.

Engineers have developed decision-making and motion-planning technology to limit injuries and damage when self-driving vehicles are involved in unavoidable crashes. After recognizing that a collision of some kind is inevitable, the system works by analyzing all available options and choosing the course of action with the least serious outcome.

More than a third of women in four low-income countries experienced mistreatment during childbirth, with younger and less educated women at greater risk. Physical and verbal abuse during childbirth peaked between 30 minutes before birth until 15 minutes after birth, and mistreatment was more common in younger, less educated women, according to a study in The Lancet which combined observations of 2,016 women during labour and childbirth with surveys of 2,672 women post-childbirth in Ghana, Guinea, Myanmar, and Nigeria.

As research involving the transplantation of human 'mini-brains' -- known as brain organoids -- into animals to study disease continues to expand, so do the ethical debates around the practice. A new paper published in Cell Stem Cell by researchers from Penn Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs seeks to clarify the abilities of brain organoids and suggests an ethical framework that better defines and contextualizes these organoids and establishes thresholds for their use.

Every year in the United States, about 7,500 people die while waiting for an organ transplant, and that number is expected to increase in coming years as demographics shift.

Experts in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology, from many of the world's leading radiology, medical physics and imaging informatics groups, today published an aspirational statement to guide the development of AI in radiology. The multi-society statement focuses on three major areas: data, algorithms and practice.