Hugo Aerts

Excited to share our new @TheLancet Perspective with @EricTopol . For decades, the thymus was considered largely irrelevant after childhood. Emerging evidence now suggests this “forgotten organ” may play an important role throughout life.

@TheLancet @EricTopol A link to the paper can be found here: thelancet.com/journals/lance…

Excited to share our new @TheLancet Perspective with @EricTopol . For decades, the thymus was considered largely irrelevant after childhood. Emerging evidence now suggests this “forgotten organ” may play an important role throughout life.

Thank you, @EricTopol! It has been a true pleasure collaborating on this perspective. Amazing to see how rapidly our understanding of this long-overlooked organ is evolving, and how AI and imaging may help make immune system health measurable at scale.

Grateful for the collaborations and support from: @TheLancet @scrippsresearch @MassGenBrigham @MGBResearchNews @Harvard @harvardmed @MaastrichtUMC

I wrote about this 6 weeks ago at Ground Truths when the 2 @Nature papers by @HugoAerts and colleagues came out. Today it's a "Health Alert"! wapo.st/4dmGMQU

📊 New key findings on the thymus: ☑️ Better thymic health ➡️ lower cancer & cardiovascular mortality ☑️ Linked to improved immunotherapy outcomes ☑️ Influenced by lifestyle factors like smoking & obesity 👨‍⚕️ @HugoAerts of @MassGenBrigham | @Nature 🔗 ascopost.com/news/march-202…

The medical dogma has been that the adult thymus is involuted, fatty tissue, and not functional. Was that ever wrong! erictopol.substack.com/p/your-thymus-…

Don't take the time to read about the new landmark studies that put our thymus gland at center stage for healthy aging erictopol.substack.com/p/your-thymus-…

Loved this deep dive into our recent @Nature papers on thymic health. Insightful take and great breakdown of the key ideas. @EricTopol, thank you for taking the time to explore it in detail!

Thymus health is a predictor of lifelong well-being and immunotherapy effectiveness @Nature @Simon_Bernatz @aim_harvard @nbirkbak @AarhusUni @HugoAerts nature.com/articles/s4158… nature.com/articles/s4158… nature.com/articles/d4158…

Beyond all of this, in a 2nd @Nature paper by the same team thymus, health associated with improved response to cancer immunotherapy @HugoAerts @simonbernatz and colleagues nature.com/articles/s4158…

@EricTopol @Nature @simonbernatz Thank you for sharing this! These two Nature papers were a true team effort. Thank you for noting these striking findings was how strongly thymic health relates to immunotherapy outcomes and longevity. For more information, you can go here: x.com/HugoAerts/stat…

Big implications, folks, for today's new reports on the thymus gland and healthspan —Our thymus gland largely involutes after the teenage years, but AI used to determine its persistent level of health —Healthy adult thymus linked to an array of remarkably improved health outcomes in 2 cohorts —Cardiovascular incidence and mortality reduced (Figure); also less all-cause mortality —Pulmonary mortality, digestive disease, metabolic disease mortality reduced (Figure) —Reduced inflammation; reduced lung cancer; improved metabolic markers nature.com/articles/s4158…

👉 More to come - we’ll share deeper dives in the coming days

The second paper can be found here: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Big news: the thymus may be critical for adult health What if we missed something fundamental about the immune system? In two back-to-back papers in Nature, we show thymic health (AI on 30,000+ CT scans) links to longevity, disease risk & immunotherapy outcomes.

Using AI on CT data from 30,000+ people, we found that the health of the thymus varies strongly between people – and is linked to longevity, disease risk, and response to immunotherapy.

Did you know your face can reveal your biological age? Researchers at @MassGenBrigham developed FaceAge, an #AI algorithm that predicts biological age and survival outcomes for patients with cancer using a single photo. Patients with cancer appeared five years older than their actual age, and higher FaceAge predictions were linked to worse survival outcomes. Read more: massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsr… #AI #CancerResearch #HealthTech

Did you know your face can reveal your biological age? @MGBResearchNews has developed FaceAge, an #AI algorithm that predicts biological age survival outcomes for patients with cancer using a single photo. Patients with cancer appeared five years older than their actual age, and higher FaceAge predictions were linked to worse survival outcomes. Learn more: spklr.io/6019CPed #CancerResearch #HealthTech

Cross-Care is our new #LLM benchmark for measuring safety/bias in the #healthcare domain. We find misalignments between real biomedical facts, pretraining data, and LLM knowledge representation. Read more (arxiv.org/abs/2405.05506) and explore our website (crosscare.net)