Artificially intelligent software could help doctors treat a problem that is, quite literally, a pain in the arse: prostate cancer. A team of radiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, built a convolutional neural network to analyse MRI scans of male nether regions and detect signs of the cancer. These types …

The NHS has named the overlord of its digital health quango and talked up plans to put data specialists on cancer and mental health policy teams as tech support. The body, NHSX, was announced in February in a bid to create a centralised health tech force to unite disparate digital roles in NHS England and make decisions on …

Machine-learning algorithms can help doctors diagnose children affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, according to fresh research. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) describes a range of conditions that are caused when a woman consumes excessive amounts of booze during her pregnancy. Such benders can impact the …

Miscreants gained access to US healthcare billing vendor AccuDoc Solutions' database for about a week in September, exposing the data of at least 2.65 million people. North Carolina-based Atrium Health, a customer of AccuDoc Solutions, this week said it had been affected by the breach. The firm operates 44 hospitals across …

BSides ManchesterA children's nurse prescribed hospitals ways to improve their computer security at the BSides conference in Manchester, England, earlier this month. Jelena Milosevic developed an interest in cybersecurity over the past four years while working as an on-call nurse in several hospitals across the Netherlands, where she said …

NHS England must re-evaluate the way it outsources work to the private sector in the wake of "continued squabbles" with Capita over the mismanaged £700m Primary Support Care (PSC) contract. The seven-year agreement that began in September 2015, which includes an option to extend it for three years, was to provide support …

Israel Cyber WeekHealthcare regulations oblige medical equipment vendors to focus on developing the next generation of technologies rather than addressing current cybersecurity issues, according to experts presenting at the eighth Israel Cyber Week. Ophir Zilbiger, partner and head of the BDO Cybersecurity Center Israel consultancy, said …

Healthcare providers are the top users of public clouds, says analyst firm IDC. The outfit’s new “Worldwide Semiannual Industry Cloud Tracker” reports that growth in cloud spend across four industry sectors – finance, healthcare, manufacturing and the public sector – is ratting along at US$22.5bn a year with expected growth of …

The American Medical Association does not believe that using AI is essential in healthcare and will benefit all patients, according to a new report. It published its first policy recommendations on ‘augmented intelligence’ in time for its Annual Meeting in June. “As technology continues to advance and evolve, we have a unique …

Up to 270 women in the UK could have died of cancer due to a "computer algorithm failure" dating back to 2009 under the NHS' breast screening programme - British health secretary Jeremy Hunt said today. In a Parliamentary statement, Hunt said nearly half a million women between the age of 68 and 71 were not invited to their …

Researchers have come up with an optical gadget which, when attached to a smartphone, can check samples for 12 infectious diseases at once. The team, led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University, devised the equipment to solve the problem of diagnosis …

If there's one thing security vendors love it's a catchilly-named piece of malware to whip up fervor over, and boy is it a good day to be Symantec. The company on Monday introduced the world to Orangeworm, a particularly nasty hacking operation that has been mainly attacking companies in the healthcare field. The operation is …

A US healthcare company seemingly exposed on the public internet contact information for roughly 10,000 medical professionals. IT pro Brian Wethern said he warned Health Stream nine days ago that one of its now-removed websites had left a database of users out in the open, allowing anyone to slurp the first and last names of …

Medical AI systems are particularly vulnerable to attacks and have been overlooked in security research, a new study suggests. Researchers from Harvard University believe they have demonstrated the first examples of how medical systems can be manipulated in a paper [PDF] published on arXiv. Sam Finlayson, lead author of the …

Scientists in Belgium have tested the security of a wireless brain implant called a neurostimulator – and found that its unprotected signals can be hacked with off-the-shelf equipment. And because this particularly bit of kit resides amid sensitive gray matter – to treat conditions like Parkinson's – the potential consequences …

Thirteen European countries have agreed to link up genomic databases in a bid to give boffins access to a research cohort of more than one million genomes by 2022. The declaration commits the signatories - including the UK, Finland, Estonia and Spain - to work together to ensure secure cross-border access to genomic and other …

As memories of last May's WannaCry cyber attack fade, the healthcare sector and Britain's NHS are still deep in learning. According to October's National Audit Office (NAO) report (PDF), 81 NHS Trusts, 603 primary care organisations and 595 GP practices in England and Wales were infected by the malware, with many others in …

Cisco’s Talos security limb has warned that specialist medical hardware has remote code execution and denial of service bugs. Talos researchers say Natus Xltek EEG medical products are susceptible to “A specially crafted network packet” that “can cause a stack buffer overflow resulting in code execution.” Which is rather …