Advances in Care

On the final episode of 2025, host Erin Welsh is joined by Courtney Allison, host of NewYork-Presbyterian’s health and wellness podcast, Health Matters, to recap the year’s highlights from their dozens of conversations with clinicians, researchers, and health care specialists from Columbia & Weill Cornell Medicine. They highlight key takeaways, revisit groundbreaking treatments that were pioneered across the institution, and discuss several research updates that are shaping the future of medicine for both physicians and patients.  
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For any patient diagnosed with depression for the first time, the recommended course of treatment is the same: a medication like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), an evidence based psychotherapy, or both. But there is a large group of people for whom these treatments simply won't work. That’s where Dr. Conor Liston and his team focus. In this episode from the Advances in Care archives, Dr. Liston speaks with former host Catherine Price about his work mapping the brain is helping doctors better understand where depression is impacting certain brain structures and what that means for the symptoms patients present. Dr. Liston’s work is focused on identifying how these symptoms impact patients' brains and using those findings to identify the best treatment approach.
Since this episode aired, Dr. Liston and his colleagues have continued to build on their research regarding a specific region of the brain called the “salience network.” They found that the salience network was considerably larger in people with clinical depression than in those without, and that people with larger salience networks in childhood were more likely to develop depression later in life. Their research points to an enlarged salience network as the first objective biomarker for diagnosing depression, which could revolutionize how depression is treated, and allow for intervention even before symptoms develop.

In this episode from the Advances in Care archives, Dr. Pierre Elias sits down with Catherine Price to talk about how utilizing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can help diagnose patients even before symptoms develop, and support doctors by freeing them up to focus on providing personalized care to their patients. They discuss navigating bias in both artificial intelligence and clinical care, and how new technology will improve the future of medicine.
Since this episode aired, Dr. Elias and his collaborators expanded their research involving AI and cardiac care, developing tools for detecting mitral regurgitation and heart failure.
Additionally, a team at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia used AI as a fertility treatment for azoospermia, and NewYork-Presbyterian deepened its commitment to developing applications of AI in medicine through a $2 billion campaign to invest in talent and technology.
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With perspectives spanning hepatobiliary, gynecologic, and cardiac surgeries, NewYork-Presbyterian’s Dr. Jason Hawksworth (Columbia), Dr. Tamatha Fenster (Weill Cornell Medicine), and Dr. Arnar Geirsson (Columbia) describe how they each came to incorporate robotics into their practices. One of the biggest takeaways: robotic surgeries allow for more accuracy in minimally-invasive approaches; so patients experience shorter hospital stays and quicker recoveries, even after major procedures. But there are some limitations to robotic surgeries that the doctors are still navigating. Dr. Fenster discusses how there are haptics limitations in robotic surgery. As a result, she shares more about her innovative smartHER 3D MRI program that is addressing this issue and details how her and her team are developing a way of holographically projecting 3D MRIs over patients to help guide surgeons while they operate.
Since this episode aired, a team at Weill Cornell Medicine performed the first fully robotic liver transplant in the state of New York, and the Robotic Cardiac Surgery Program at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia completed over 100 robotic heart surgeries. Additionally, Dr. Tamatha Fenster put smartHER 3D MRI technology into practice.
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Catherine Price and Dr. Emile Bacha, Chief of the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia discuss the history of heart surgery, ventricular assist devices, and a new frontier in cardiac surgery: The Total Artificial Heart. Dr. Bacha tells the groundbreaking story of successfully fitting a pediatric patient with a Total Artificial Heart. He explains the nuances of the procedure, and how a backpack-powered heart gave his pediatric patient another chance.
In 2023, Dr. Bacha led a team to complete the first domino infant partial heart transplant in the world. Surgeons in his division also completed the first split-root domino transplant in the northeast, saving the lives of three young patients. Most recently, Dr. Bacha became the 106th president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
For more information visit nyp.org/Advances