The 12th annual symposium of the BioMedical Engineering and Imaging Institute (BMEII) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai focused on precision medicine and the future of digital health.
The event featured renowned academic and industry representatives from around the world who participated in panel discussions about the precision medicine imperative and the quest to extend the “health span”—defined as the number of years people live a heathy life free of disease—in a multidisciplinary manner with a focus on medical imaging and engineering.
The innovation station and poster session provided hands-on demonstrations of current research.
More than 325 people, including researchers, physicians, industry leaders, medical students, and high school students, attended the event at the New York Academy of Medicine. The event was held Wednesday and Thursday, March 20-21.
The symposium began with welcome remarks from BMEII’s Director Zahi A. Fayad, PhD, who emphasized the need to back up recent developments in screening, longevity, and pharmaceuticals with evidence and data. He shared this vision during the event, ensuring attendees walked away with a better and more holistic understanding of the current and future state of precision medicine.
A major highlight of the symposium was the panel discussion about the future of digital medicine. With five industry and academic leaders, this discussion addressed many of the challenges health care is facing as consumer health technologies grow rapidly and move into clinical areas. These challenges center on user compliance and data privacy.
“I think the biggest problem is also trying to get the stakeholders around the same table and developing some consensus as to how they can share, if not the proprietary information, but how can they kind of use all of that [data] towards the good of humankind,” said Jagmeet P. Singh, MD, ScM, DPhil, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He works closely with patients within the cardiology department who have received implantable cardiac devices and has first-hand experience with the long-term challenges that come with working with multiple manufacturers.
“So, now you have third-party vendors—in fact, over the course of the last year, there are almost 120 different remote monitoring companies that have come up—that are trying to standardize the data from these implantable devices that can be used uniformly by all health care givers,” he added.
Brendan Carr, MD, MA, MS
The symposium also included sessions for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to build their interest in scientific research. A professional development panel, hosted by PhD candidates at Icahn Mount Sinai, allowed leaders in the field to share their personal experiences, challenges, and successes with the students. The innovation station and poster session provided hands-on demonstrations of current research in the medical imaging space by BMEII members and scientists from other institutes.
Health care is bound to change in dramatic ways in the future, and the symposium addressed the research and innovation that is shaping these changes.
Brendan Carr, MD, MA, MS, Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, summarized the importance of the research BMEII is doing: “The clinical delivery system doesn’t exist without the pioneering research portfolio, and the pioneering research portfolio exists because it’s so unbelievably compelling to save lives and improve people’s health outcomes. That synergy is special—it’s a big piece of what this conference is about.”