According to a White House press release, President Obama will follow through on his State of the Union call for a comprehensive map of the human brain by announcing $100 million in federal investments for the project on Tuesday morning. Funds for the project — dubbed the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative — will be appropriated through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and will be included in the FY 2014 budget that the president is set to release next week.

The project’s central component will be the Brain Activity Map, which seeks to “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought” in an effort to “explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex links between brain function and behavior.” As President Obama explained during the State of the Union, such advancements could herald the key to unlocking pressing public health mysteries, including effective methods of curing brain injuries and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

That’s particularly significant in a time of rising dementia rates among Americans. A recent pair of studies released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) concluded that a combination of factors — including an aging population, more targeted early diagnosis efforts, and the failure to discover a viable cure — led to a staggering 68 percent increase in Alzheimer’s mortality rates between 2000 and 2010. The associated health care costs of that rise in the disease were $200 billion in 2012 alone, including $140 billion to government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. If the current trend holds, those costs could balloon to over $1 trillion by the year 2050.

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On Monday, the New York Times reported on the controversy surrounding Intuitive Surgical Inc.’s “daVinci” robotic surgery system — a product that allows doctors to “conduct” surgeries remotely on a console while robotic arms scale and translate their movements onto the actual patient. While high-tech systems like this are supposed to make procedures safer and more efficient, the daVinci lawsuit — which centers on a patient who eventually died from complications arising from the system’s use — reveals that a combination of factors, such as inadequate product testing and aggressive marketing strategies driven by profits, often undermine that goal.

That’s a frustrating reality for health care reform advocates on the lookout for effective methods of cutting national health expenditures while improving patient care. Although innovation in health care technology had undoubtedly improved lives and made care more efficient in the aggregate, as demonstrated through breakthroughs like vaccines and birth control, it has also accounted for at least half of the increase in health care spending in the last 70 years. While that may sound counter-intuitive at first, a quick dive into America’s health care culture shows why it’s not — and why innovations like “robot doctors” aren’t actually lowering health care costs:

1. It’s almost impossible to tell how much various health care technologies actually cost.

One of the most persistent problems in the American medical industry is rampant health care price opacity. Time Magazine’s recent investigative look into Americans’ sky-high medical bills revealed what many already suspected — that the prices of various medical products and services are essentially arbitrary, fluctuating wildly from one hospital chain to another and even more wildly between different geographic regions.

Since there isn’t an easily-accessible national database of medical devices and their prices, manufacturers can pitch their products at varying rates to hospitals and jack up prices with relative impunity. Those inflated costs are then passed on to consumers by providers looking to recoup their money — and since patients tend to trust their doctors and not know much about the intricacies of health care device markets, they don’t ask too many questions when they’re left to pick up an enormous, generally non-itemized tab at the end of a hospital stay that gives them no information about why they’re being charged what they are. Thus, price gouging and a general lack of perfect information in health care allows expensive consumption to continue unchecked.

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The quest to improve patient care, maximize medical efficiency, and curb wasteful spending by digitizing Americans’ patient records, insurers’ claims, and providers’ treatment requests just gained a powerful new ally: “Watson,” IBM’s revolutionary data-mining supercomputer that made national waves when it defeated reigning Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings at his own game.

American Medical News reports that health insurance giant WellPoint has struck up a deal with IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to use the supercomputer — which has spent its post-Jeopardy days amassing and “learning” massive amounts of data about the American health care, insurance, and public health industries — for two pioneer programs to automatically process, review, and pre-authorize medical claims and treatment requests, as well as a third program dubbed “Interactive Care Insights for Oncology” that will “identify individualized treatment options for cancer patients, starting with lung cancer” in order to advise oncologists on the latest and most effective treatment regimens by incorporating up-to-the minute longitudinal medical studies and cancer data into its suggestions.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Cindy Wakefield, a Regional Director for Public Relations at WellPoint, pointed out that the new technology has the potential to have a big impact on the health care industry. “We believe the IBM Watson technology can improve the efficiency and quality of treatment, potentially eliminating unnecessary testing, enhancing the consistency of actions, and accelerating the time to treatment via expedited decision-making processing,” Wakefield explained. “We are continuing to train Watson, and we are teaching Watson by ‘feeding’ it information such as our medical policies and clinical guidelines.”

Using Watson’s technology to automate claims processes could be a potent catalyst for a more efficient American health care industry — which is often bogged down by poor inter-provider communication, incomplete and non-centralized data, and archaic paper records. The supercomputer could also advise providers on the most efficient and appropriate use of treatments based on each individual medical claim, patients’ specific insurance benefits, and patients’ medical histories by analyzing health care data from across the country.

Interestingly, if Watson concludes that a physician or provider’s treatment request is not the most effective one based on a patient’s history and medical benefits, the computer can register its disagreement — but as Wakefield explained to ThinkProgress, it cannot override the provider’s decision or deny treatment requests. Instead, a human nurse would have to review Watson’s alternative suggestion, and then make a judgment call along with the provider on whether or not to comply with it.

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69-year-old Rebecca S. Tomczak suffers sarcoidosis, a condition that leads to lung scarring and can devolce into a terminal disease if left untreated. The doctors told her that without a full lung transplant, her prognosis would be dire — and while Tomczak could have qualified for transplant lists at several hospitals, she had to scour through several providers before finding one that would take up her case, since she’s a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. Her adherence to her faith prevents her from receiving blood transfusions, which are typically necessary for transplant surgeries.

As the New York Times reports, Tomczak was finally able to track down Dr. Scott A. Scheinin of the Houston-based Methodist Hospital, who agreed to treat her on her own terms. The hospital had conducted several successful bloodless lung transplants before — specifically tailored towards Jehovah’s Witnesses — and had developed an innovative, seemingly safe medical approach to treating these patients while also respecting their closely-held tenets. As Dr. Scheinin put it, “At the end of the day, if you agree to take care of these patients, you agree to do it on their terms.”

Critics might balk that tailoring medical procedures towards a patient’s religious beliefs is impractical and costly. But the new system that the doctors at Methodist developed was more cost-effective than regular transplant procedures — and arguably more safe, as there has been some evidence that blood transfusions may actually be risky in certain cases:

The economy is also helping the blood management movement. Processing and transfusing a single unit of blood can cost as much as $1,200, and many hospitals are trying to cut back. Administrators at Methodist said their bloodless lung transplants typically cost 30 percent less than other lung transplants, partly because careful management of hemoglobin levels before surgery has resulted in fewer complications and shorter stays.

Experts say they are beginning to see a measurable impact on blood usage, although the data to support it are not yet available. Dr. Richard J. Benjamin, the chief medical officer of the American Red Cross, predicted that the numbers would show the first decline in use since the AIDS scare began in the 1980s, perhaps by one million units.

“We’re changing this culture, this knee-jerk transfusion reaction,” Dr. Scheinin said. “And I think that’s been a good thing for all our patients.”

While Tomczak’s story is intriguing for its implications on medical innovation and reducing health care costs, it also highlights a positive way to reconcile the tensions between modern medical technology and religious dogma. Rather than being a case in which a doctor imposes his or her conscientious biases on a patient — such as the Irish medical team that incited global outrage after denying a life-saving abortion to a woman who later passed away — Tomczak’s experiences are an example of a doctor keeping his patient’s health at the forefront while also respecting that patient’s ethical choices through creativity and innovation. That may not be achievable in every single case — but this particular story shows that it certainly is possible.

Abortion opponents have rushed to introduce a slew of new abortion restrictions in the 2013 legislative session, attacking reproductive rights from all angles. But it’s not just about restricting access to existing medical procedures. Anti-choice activists are also looking ahead to the future, attempting to prevent medical technology from advancing to better accommodate women’s reproductive care.

Even though telemedical abortion services — which allow doctors to consult with their patients over a video conference and prescribe the RU-486 abortion pill remotely — can help expand reproductive care to women who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise, abortion opponents are scaling a coordinated attack against the new technology. Decrying “webcam abortions” as an unsafe medical practice, despite the significant evidence to the contrary, anti-abortion lawmakers are increasingly advocating legislation to outlaw it. Here are five facts to keep in mind as the anti-choice community gears up for this fight:

1. Telemedicine is increasingly becoming a routine medical practice, and abortion is the only type of telehealth procedure that is tightly restricted. Telehealth, which first began being used in the 1960s to treat astronauts in space, has advanced over the past few decades to become a standard medical practice. In the past five years, telemedicine’s reach has quadrupled to treat 10 million Americans. The federal government has adopted the practice to treat chronically ill veterans. According to the chief executive officer of the American Telemedicine Association, abortion is the only area where lawmakers have restricted telemedicine. As Jordan Goldberg, the state advocacy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, explained to Bloomberg, “There is a very clear division: Women are different, women who are attempting to access medication abortion are different.”

2. Nearly 95 percent of women who have telemedical abortions feel “very satisfied” with the procedure. Several studies have proven that telemedical abortion consultations are safe and effective. Despite anti-choice activists’ insistence that women must be face-to-face with their doctors, there is no difference between the women who visit a doctor’s office for a follow-up appointment after an abortion and the women who simply call to follow up instead. And 94 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy with the help of video technology report they feel “very satisfied” with their procedure.

3. Restricting telemedical abortion services disproportionately hurts low-income women in rural areas. Women who live in rural areas typically lack access to nearby abortion providers, and low-income women in particular often can’t afford the transportation to the closest health clinic. That problem is exacerbated by the mounting number of restrictions imposed on abortion providers, which narrows the pool of available abortion doctors even further. But after Iowa piloted the nation’s first telemedical abortion program, rural women’s abortion access significantly increased.

4. Allowing health clinics to practice telemedicine decreases the number of second-trimester abortions. If women in rural areas have more readily available options to access the reproductive care they need, they won’t have to put off having an abortion until they can travel to a surgical abortion clinic. The case study in Iowa proved that expanding access to the abortion pill through telemedical services can help lower second-trimester abortions. While abortion is still a very safe procedure when it is performed in the second trimester, earlier abortions do have a slightly lower chance of complications — and, of course, women who decide to terminate a pregnancy should not be forced to wait months to have the voluntary medical procedure.

5. Most of the states that are restricting telemedical abortion consultations don’t offer those services in the first place. At least ten states have banned the use of telehealth services to provide abortion care over the past several years, and another five are considering passing legislation to do so this year. But Bloomberg points out that telemedical abortions weren’t even being offered in the majority of those states the first place; Iowa is the sole state where lawmakers are considering a ban that would restrict a medical practice that is already in place. The anti-choice community — led by Americans United for Life, the anti-abortion group that drafted the language for the telemedicine bans — is working proactively to prevent the expansion of telemedical abortion services, particularly through indirect abortion restrictions that would require doctors to show women an ultrasound in person.

In a technological breakthrough that holds special promise for the future of stem cell research, researchers at Heriot Watt University have successfully used a 3D printer to create viable human stem cells of a predetermined shape and size, CNET News reports.

The development — which constitutes a novel and unprecedented application of an already-nascent technology — has researchers considering its implications for the future, including the possibility of full scale organ and tissue printing that would make organ donations and transplants less vital for public health:

The printer creates 3D spheroids using delicate embryonic cell cultures floating in a “bio ink” medium. They end up looking like little bubbles. Each droplet can contain as few as five stem cells. Basically, this comes down to the printer “ink” being stem cells rather than plastic or another material.

Dr. Will Shu is part of the research team working on the project. “In the longer term, we envisage the technology being further developed to create viable 3D organs for medical implantation from a patient’s own cells, eliminating the need for organ donation, immune suppression, and the problem of transplant rejection,” Shu said in a release from Heriot-Watt.

Perhaps most importantly, the stem cells survived the printing process and remained viable. Shu says this is the first time human embryonic stem cells have been 3D printed. Printing out organs may be far down the line, but it’s just one potential application. The method could also be used to print out human tissue for drug testing.