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I think your question needs to be more specific - "Healthcare Technology" or "Healthcare Information Technology". The latter would not include medical devices or hardware focus. The former is a superset of latter, obviously.Alex has already identified the two biggest HIT conferences: HIMSS and RSNA. They are the commercial, vendor-focused, high marketing events. If you want to get a bit more academic insight into HIT research, then AMIA conferences (www.amia.org) are the ones to go to in US. Worldwide, I'd say IMIA.org is the main one (although you'd probably find a significant overlap in attendees).I'm never attended a TEDMED.com conference in-person, but have listened to the youtube videos of plenty speakers from it. It is a more forward-thinking, bit eccentric, IFTF.org type event. Worth checking out.Some really informal, unconference type events are also out there. See quantifiedself.com. They have regular (almost every two months) meet-ups in various main cities including SF, NYC etc.

Nearly two-thirds of astronauts have reported problems with their eyes after spending months at the International Space Station, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).According to lead researcher Noam Alperin, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, "some of the astronauts had severe structural changes that were not fully reversible upon return to Earth."The problems includes flattening at the back of their eyeballs and inflamed optic nerves, which can lead to far-sightedness.Researchers initially thought that the problems were due to changes in the way blood is distributed in the body in microgravity, with more fluid lingering around the head area than would be typical on Earth where gravity pulls it downward.Alperin and colleagues studied before and after brain scans on seven astronauts who had spent multiple months at the orbiting space station, and compared them to nine astronauts who made short trips up and back aboard the US space shuttle, which was retired in 2011.They found that long-duration astronauts had significantly more cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the brain.This fluid typically helps cushion the brain and spinal cord while circulating nutrients and removing waste materials.On Earth, this spinal fluid system is designed to accommodate changes whether a person is sitting, standing or lying down. But in space, "the system is confused by the lack of the posture-related pressure changes," Alperin said.Longterm space flyers also had "significantly increased post-flight flattening of their eyeballs and increased optic nerve protrusion," said the findings.Alperin said the research offers the first quantitative evidence cerebral spinal fluid plays a direct role in visual impairment syndrome.NASA is currently studying ways to counteract these eye problems, as the US space agency works toward sending people on months or years-long missions to Mars by the 2030s.Retired NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson said he did not experience any problems with vision after his five month stint in space in 2007."It appears—from additional NASA studies performed at Johnson Space Center in Houston—that I have a special protein sailing through my body, that does not allow this phenomenon to occur," Anderson wrote on http://quora.com."Protein question still being researched, I believe," he added on Twitter.Source Astronaut vision may be impaired by spinal fluid changes: studyHope this helps

As a potential treatment for Alzheimer's, the study is very preliminary -- the experiments were done in a mouse model of the disease, and with relatively new methods.There's been a lot of press regarding the study, and what's rarely mentioned is that the most interesting parts of the paper aren't specific only to Alzheimer's, but really all neurodegenerative diseases (potentially).Ultrasound therapies have recently been tested in many areas -- one such example is temporarily disrupting the blood brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is what keeps the brain separate from the rest of our circulation. However, this safeguard becomes an obstacle when designing drugs for brain disorders, as the drugs have to be able to penetrate the BBB. The promise of ultrasound deliver methods is that we might be able to safely, and temporarily disrupt this barrier just enough to allow through a drug or antibody or other treatment that would normally not penetrate the BBB. There is also an imaging application, since molecular markers or imaging agents could also be delivered in this manner. This article in Science Magazine gives a very nice layperson summary of the potential of ultrasound for drug delivery.Also known as "Focused ultrasound", this technology is an emerging therapeutic tool which has a lot of potential (Home - Focused Ultrasound Foundation), and so far, many FUS-drug delivery methods have proven safe and well tolerated in rodent models, but testing in primate species will be needed as well.So, its very interesting that, absent any delivered drug, the application of ultrasound itself had a measurable effect in this study--and that's the second really interesting part of the study that is more general than an AD-specific therapy. The author's working hypothesis is that the ultrasound treatment, via disrupting the BBB, somehow activate microglia, (a major component of the brain's immune response) to start actively clearing away plaque. It has been known for a while that microglia are associated with amyloid plaques, (Association of Microglia with Amyloid Plaques in Brains of APP23 Transgenic Mice), and there's a growing body of research on the immune component of Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases (Microglial dysfunction in brain aging and Alzheimer's disease). In the Leinenga and Gotz paper, the authors don't really have a good explanation as to the mechanism by which their treatment has activated microglia, or if rather than activating microglia, have simply allowed other immune cells to penetrate the BBB temporarily.If microglia can be activated by focused ultrasound, then the question is why and how, and for how long, and at what dose/frequency. If, instead, the ultrasound treatment is allowing peripheral immune cells to penetrate the BBB, then that is also intersting. But, we first have to work out the mechanism of how ultrasound disruption of BBB --> microglial activation. Here's a more detail blog post on brain-blogger about microglia-related questions that are raised by the study: http://brainblogger.com/.../ultrasound-to-slow.../Also, it turns out that Leinenga and Gotz were not the first to show the effect of focused ultrasound on amyloid plaque clearance. Scientists from the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, also showed reduced plaque after ultrasound in the " TgCRND8" mouse model of plaque deposition (they published in RSNA, not Science Translation Medicine). So, good news everyone, the finding is replicated!http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/abs/10.1148/radiol.14140245In general, its quite possibly too early to accurately predict how well an ultrasound-based BBB disrupting treatment will do for Alzheimer's, but it certainly opens up some intriguing possibilities for other diseases.