The Humans Are Coming: AI in Neuroscience | Eric Rosenthal | TEDxBoston

About this video

Eric S. Rosenthal, MD, draws on Massachusetts’ revolutionary history to explore a new revolution in digital health and AI within medicine and neuroscience. Massachusetts was not merely the place where a new government began; it was a place where ordinary people built new systems for perceiving signals, sharing information, coordinating action, and imagining a different future. Two hundred and fifty years later, we are surrounded by signals again — in the pauses in a patient’s voice, the distance someone walks each day, the social networks they maintain, and the countless fragments of a medical record. Drawing from the breadth of digital and AI expertise at the Mass General Brigham Neuroscience Institute, the talk highlights how privacy-protecting, human-centered technologies — including ambient documentation, early diagnostic algorithms, voice and movement sensing, digital biomarkers, social and community mapping, predictive analytics, and monitoring that can help a clinician understand a patient not as a snapshot during a brief office encounter, but as a person navigating challenges through daily life — may transform care for people with conditions of the brain, spine, and nervous system, including stroke and cerebrovascular disease, ALS, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions and dementias, epilepsy, tumors of the brain and spine, coma, neuromuscular disease, and other complex neurological and neurosurgical conditions. The talk articulates an aspiration in which technology recedes into the background, the patient comes more fully into view, and clinicians have more room for the work only humans can do: listening, noticing, explaining, comforting, accompanying patients through uncertainty, and collaborating to heal, cure, and prevent illness. Eric S. Rosenthal, MD, is Director of Digital and Intelligent Health for the Mass General Brigham Neuroscience Institute, Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. His clinical and research work focuses on improving care for people with conditions of the brain, spine, and nervous system. His work spans digital biomarkers, collaborative data science, and monitoring-informed clinical trials that use EEG, multimodal patient data, and artificial intelligence to understand patients more fully, personalize treatment, accelerate discovery, and make care more present, trustworthy, and human. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx