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As I write this note, my mother is dying in a hospital room in Southern France. She is alone. Visitors are not allowed. My elderly father is quarantined in his home, an ancient four-story stone house that dates almost from the Middle Ages. In two months they would have celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. But [Read More]
Shakespeare once wrote, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Today, we must ask a different question: “Are people thoughtless, or are they simply selfish?” Despite orders for social distancing and self-isolation to mitigate transmission of COVD-19 in virtually every country, crowds continue to gather in public places, shop in large numbers, [Read More]
A few days ago, Andreas Voss, the President of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, posted an advisory1 stating the controversial paper published in IJAA on the favorable effects of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin in patients with COVID-19 infection2 did not meet the journal’s scientific standards. Meanwhile, countless physicians on the frontlines prescribe these drugs. Many also prescribe [Read More]
Monitoring WhatsApp posts from more than 7000 physicians in 60 countries is disheartening. Lack of personal protective equipment(PPE), the propagation of contradictory or obviously false information by administrative leaders, unclear instructions, and orders to refrain from sharing information about triage, the poor availability of isolation rooms, ventilators, negative pressure procedure suites, and PPE do not [Read More]
The COVIDBRONCH™ Initiative fostered research and education about COVID-19 and related illnesses. Created by Drs. Rob Lentz and Henri Colt in March 2020, the Initiative included an international network of airway specialists and global or regional opinion leaders from universities, national medical societies, and the private sector. Three projects included (1) COVIDBRONCH-LIT, a central repository [Read More]
I cannot help but admire foreign language-speaking colleagues who are able to write, lecture, study and teach in English. Since the increasing economic and political power of the United States, the results of two world wars and the declining international presence of a postcolonial Europe, English became the major language of science and medicine. Earlier [Read More]
It took thirty years (1967-1997) for computer chess programs to defeat world champion players, but it was only eight years (2009-2017) before DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, the world’s premier Go player. Video games like Starcraft are harder for computers to play than board games such as chess or Go, but after only 18 months [Read More]
September marked another exciting moment for bronchoscopists in Bangladesh. The 2nd International Conference on Interventional Pulmonology was held in the capital city of Dhaka. A prestigious international faculty under the leadership of Professors Mohammad Hiron (Chairman BABIP), Akhtar Hossain (Vice-Chairman), Dr. Sayedul Islam (Secretary-General), and Abdur Rouf (Program Director) brought bronchoscopists from throughout the country [Read More]
This is a second post relating to the promising role of artificial intelligence in interventional pulmonology. My point is that lung specialists will spend less time learning facts and figures that are easily replaced by computer-generated analyses of complex algorithms. Much of this is because of Deep learning. This subset of machine learning (programs that [Read More]
This is the first of several posts about the role of artificial intelligence and the future of interventional pulmonology*. I am confident our field will change immensely in the years ahead, and that artificial intelligence will not only change how we learn and perform procedures but also how we interact with patients. The sooner we [Read More]