Adam de la Zerda develops new medical imaging technologies to detect and destroy cancer.

Would you swallow a micro-robot? In a gutsy demo, physician Vivek Kumbhari navigates Pillbot, a wireless, disposable robot swallowed onstage by engineer Alex Luebke, modeling how this technology can swiftly provide direct visualization of internal organs. Learn more about how micro-robots could move us past the age of invasive endoscopies and op...

David Casarett asks: What if mainstream health care operated more like a medical marijuana dispensary?

Could we use the energy from light and sound to detect disease? TED Fellow Lei Li shares the exciting promise of photoacoustic imaging: an affordable, painless and accurate method of converting light into sound in order to create high-resolution images of what's going on inside our bodies. From early detection of breast cancer to steering medici...

Learn about the latest advances in the war against cancer from Stanford researcher Adam de la Zerda, who's working on some cutting-edge techniques of his own. Using a remarkable imaging technology that illuminates cancer-seeking gold particles injected into the body, de la Zerda's lab hopes to light the way for surgeons to remove even the tinies...

Viral beatboxer Tom Thum has an orchestra in his mouth, but how does he make all those sounds? Get an up-close-and-personal look as laryngeal surgeon Matthew Broadhurst sticks a camera down Thum's throat while he creates a mind-boggling array of noises. This hilarious, somewhat stomach-churning talk and performance is not for the squeamish! (Con...

Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. (Some graphic images.)

How do you measure a nebula? With a brain scan. In this talk, TED Fellow Michelle Borkin shows why collaboration between doctors and astronomers can lead to surprising discoveries.

AI could propel the biggest transformation in the history of medicine, says physician-scientist Eric Topol. He explains how sophisticated AI models can interpret medical images as well or better than human experts can — and, beyond that, even pick up things that human eyes can't see. Learn all the ways AI is poised to make a difference for both ...

TED Fellow Pratik Shah creates novel intersections between engineering, medical imaging, machine learning and medicine.

Is there a way to detect diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's before they advance too far? Doctors are using injected radioactive drugs that circulate through the body and act as a beacon for PET scanners. These diagnostic tools can detect the spread of diseases before they can be spotted with other types of imaging. So how exactly does this wor...

Neuroscientist Sergiu P. Pasca has made it his life's work to understand how the human brain builds itself -- and what makes it susceptible to disease. In a mind-blowing talk laden with breakthrough science, he shows how his team figured out how to grow "organoids" and what they call brain "assembloids" -- self-organizing clumps of neural tissu...

Tech that can decode your brain activity and reveal what you're thinking and feeling is on the horizon, says legal scholar and ethicist Nita Farahany. What will it mean for our already violated sense of privacy? In a cautionary talk, Farahany warns of a society where people are arrested for merely thinking about committing a crime (like in "Mino...

Geneticist Steve McCarroll wants to make an atlas of all the cells in the human body so that we can understand in precise detail how specific genes work, especially in the brain. In this fascinating talk, he shares his team's progress -- including their invention of "Drop-seq," a technology that allows scientists to analyze individual cells at a...

Today's AI algorithms require tens of thousands of expensive medical images to detect a patient's disease. What if we could drastically reduce the amount of data needed to train an AI, making diagnoses low-cost and more effective? TED Fellow Pratik Shah is working on a clever system to do just that. Using an unorthodox AI approach, Shah has deve...

Every year, tens of thousands of people have brain surgery without a single incision: there's no scalpel, no operating table, and the patient loses no blood. Instead, this procedure uses a machine that emits invisible beams of light at a precise target inside the brain. So how exactly does this treatment work? And what does it do to the tumors i...

TED Fellow Lei Li is improving medical imaging that can track the progress of diseases, such as cancer, that can otherwise go undetected.

Nearly 3,000 years ago, a Babylonian tablet described a curious illness called "miqtu" that caused symptoms ranging from facial twitching to full body convulsions. Today we know miqtu as seizures, and modern medicine has developed numerous treatments for those experiencing them. So what causes seizures, and is there any way to stop them from hap...

It's an increasingly common sight in hospitals around the world: a nurse measures our height, weight, blood pressure, and attaches a glowing plastic clip to our finger. Suddenly, a digital screen reads out the oxygen level in our bloodstream. How did that happen? Sajan Saini shows how pairing light with integrated photonics is leading to new med...

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

In a series of mind-bending demos, inventor Mary Lou Jepsen shows how we can use red light to see and potentially stimulate what's inside our bodies and brains. Taking us to the edge of optical physics, Jepsen unveils new technologies that utilize light and sound to track tumors, measure neural activity and could possibly replace the MRI machine...

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically "teenage" behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness -- that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self.

In 2008, two 9,000-year old skeletons were found with their bones infected by an all too familiar bacterium. The ancient Greeks knew its effects as phthisis; the Incans called it chaky oncay; and today we call it tuberculosis, or TB. TB is still one of the world's most infectious killers, causing more deaths than malaria or even HIV. How has it ...

The second deadliest day in the history of Mount Everest climbs happened in 1996 -- and Ken Kamler was the only doctor on the mountain that day. He shares the incredible story of the climbers' battle to save lives in extreme conditions, and uses brain imaging technology to map the medical miracle of one man who survived roughly 36 hours buried i...

How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.

As an expert on cutting-edge digital displays, Mary Lou Jepsen studies how to show our most creative ideas on screens. And as a brain surgery patient herself, she is driven to know more about the neural activity that underlies invention, creativity, thought. She meshes these two passions in a rather mind-blowing talk on two cutting-edge brain st...

Calling them "our bodies' own repair kits," Susan Solomon advocates research using lab-grown stem cells. By growing individual pluripotent stem cell lines, her team creates testbeds that could accelerate research into curing diseases -- and perhaps lead to individualized treatment, targeted not just to a particular disease but a particular person.

Surprising, but true: More women now die of heart disease than men, yet cardiovascular research has long focused on men. Pioneering doctor C. Noel Bairey Merz shares what we know and don't know about women's heart health -- including the remarkably different symptoms women present during a heart attack (and why they're often missed).

In a dark cave, bats can't see much. But even with their eyes shut, they can navigate rocky topography at incredible speeds. This is because bats aren't just guided by their eyes, but rather, by their ears. It may seem impossible to see with sound, but bats, naval officers, and doctors do it all the time. How is that possible? Jacques S. Abramow...