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🫀 Beating heart transplant 🤯 ⋆ 🤖 AI updates of the week ⋆ 🏀Wisdom from the court

As if transplanting a heart 🫀 isn't hard enough, Stanford Medicine surgeons did it while it was still beating 🤯 Couldn't pick a favorite AI update of the week, so here we are.

Zvonimir Fras

• 3 min read
🫀 Beating heart transplant 🤯 ⋆ 🤖 AI updates of the week ⋆ 🏀Wisdom from the court

Thing 1 - A change of heart (ba-dum-tsh) while it's beating

Bing AI depiction of the surgery

As if transplanting a heart 🫀 isn't hard enough, Stanford Medicine surgeons did it while it was still beating 🤯

But why?

To avoid stopping the donor's heart twice. Wait, what?

Most transplants are done with donors who have been declared brain dead. This means their brain will never work again, but their heart is still going strong.

When surgeons take the heart out, it stops. Doh!

With cardiac death donors, the heart was already stopped for some time. Surgeons need to restart it before implanting it. Huh? It's for various reasons, such as to assess its function and viability.

With brain-dead donors, the heart is stopped once and restarted in the recipient.

With cardiac-dead donors, the hearts end up being stopped twice. Which can damage the heart's tissue and impair its performance after transplantation.

BUT!

If you can transplant the heart while it's still beating, you can avoid stopping it twice.

Impacts

  • This expands the pool of available hearts - and the recipient list is long...
  • It can improve the quality and function of the donated heart
    by avoiding the second stoppage
  • It can improve the outcomes and survival rates of the recipients
    by reducing the risk of complications
We’re looking into ways of never having to stop the heart — that’s the next step.

- Brandon Guenthart, MD, clinical assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery

(source)

Thing 2 - AI updates of the week

Couldn't pick a favorite. Can't cover them all. So here we are...

  • Hugging Face launched a ChatGPT alternative called HuggingChat.
  • Runway launched the iPhone app.
    - Take a video or select one from your camera roll
    - Then, either use a text prompt, a reference image, or a preset to turn that video into something new
  • OpenAI launched a feature for ChatGPT that allows you to turn off chat history. Privacy ftw!
  • Yelp added an AI-powered search
  • TikTok's new AI avatars - kinda like Lensa
  • Waitlist for Microsoft Designer is gone.
  • Zuck (Meta/Facebook) said that AI is "the key to unlocking the metaverse" and he wants to introduce AI agents to billions of people who can interact with them in the virtual world. He also said AI is a "critical enabler" for the metaverse vision. (source 1, source 2)
  • DeepLearningAI and OpenAI launch a free "ChatGPT Prompt Engineer for Developers" course.
  • Apple is developing an AI-powered health coaching service code named Quartz. Apple has not announced any details about the service yet, but it has filed a patent for it and hired experts in health and AI.
  • PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) plans to invest $1 billion in generative AI over the next 3 years. They'll work with Microsoft and OpenAI to automate aspects of its tax, audit, and consulting services.

What did I miss?

Thing 3 - Wisdom from the Court

If you don't have the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?

- John Wooden, a legendary basketball player and coach who focused on excellence and character

If you're gonna spend ages on something, shouldn't you squeeze every last drop of long-term goodness juice out of it? 💦

Cause let's face it, you're not gonna jump at the chance to do it all over again.

And if you did, just think of all the sweet benefits we'd be missing out on in the meantime.

Cheers, Zvonimir