Welcome to Benchmarks, a weekly collection of research news and notes featuring Mass General investigators. With a research community of over 9,500 people that spans more than 30 departments centers and institutes, there’s more news each week that we can get to. Here are a few highlights:

Mass General Researchers Use AI to Triage Patients with Chest Pain

Artificial intelligence (AI) may help improve care for patients who show up at the hospital with acute chest pain, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

“To the best of our knowledge, our deep learning AI model is the first to utilize chest X-rays to identify individuals among acute chest pain patients who need immediate medical attention,” said the study’s lead author, Márton Kolossváry, MD, PhD, radiology research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.

Acute chest pain syndrome accounts for over 7 million emergency department visits annually in the United States, making it one of the most common complaints.

Fewer than 8% of these patients are diagnosed with the three major cardiovascular causes of acute chest pain syndrome, which are acute coronary syndrome, pulmonary embolism or aortic dissection.

However, the life-threatening nature of these conditions and low specificity of clinical tests, such as electrocardiograms and blood tests, lead to substantial use of cardiovascular and pulmonary diagnostic imaging, often yielding negative results. Read more.

Researchers Have Followed Over 700 People Since 1938 to Find the Keys to Happiness. Here’s What They Discovered

Robert Waldinger, MD, a physician investigator in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is co-author of a new book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

Waldinger is director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a 75-year study spanning two generations of participants.

The study tracked the lives of 724 men for over 80 years and now studies their children to understand how childhood experience reaches across decades to affect health and well-being in middle age.

The new book, which was co-written by Marc Shulz, PhD, was profiled in Fortune Magazine.

“The researchers gathered participants’ health records every five years, conducted DNA tests along the way, and received questionnaires about their lives and well-being every two years,” writes Alexa Mikhail.

“Roughly every 15 years, the researchers met the participants in-person for an interview. The researchers followed the participants’ lives in hopes of finding the key to happiness and found that it wasn’t, in fact, good health.

“One thing instead became irrefutable: strong relationships most accurately predicted people’s happiness throughout their lives.” Read more.

Tweets of the Week

This Week in Mass General History

Vermont Man Seeks Treatment for Rare Fungal Disorder

January 17, 1910—The Bennington (Vermont) Evening Banner newspaper reports that James S. Brownell, a resident of Woodstock, is traveling to Massachusetts General Hospital to seek treatment for lump jaw.

Lump jaw, also known as actinmycosis or ray fungus disease, rarely occurs in humans, with only 113 cased recorded up to 1893, according to the paper. It is much more common in cows and hogs.

The fungus is found in chaff, grain husks and corn stalks and often attacks the jaw through a decayed tooth before spreading to other tissues. Read more.

Doctors Often Miss The More Subtle Signs of Alcoholism

January 17, 1964—A story in the Santa Cruz Desert Sun details the results of a study conducted by doctors in the Mass General Alcohol Clinic.

The three doctors conducted statistical investigation of patient records from the Mass General emergency department and identified 238 patients with alcoholism that had not been diagnosed with the disease or referred to the clinic for treatment.

The results suggested that doctors were not picking up on the more subtle indications of alcoholism, particularly in patients who presented to the ER with other medical concerns.

In cases where the diagnosis was missed, the patients held jobs. They were not separated from wives nor estranged from families. They hadn’t been in trouble with police because of their drinking. The alcoholics who had been referred were opposites on all points.

The unreferred alcoholics also had other medical ailments, which attracted the diagnostic attention of the physicians, the researchers found.

“Those who were referred to the clinic for treatment were much less interesting medically —the one thing wrong with them was drunkenness.” Read more.