BOSTON / NEW YORK — Tucked just above your heart is a small organ called the thymus. Most Americans have never heard of it. Even most physicians had largely written it off as something useful in childhood and irrelevant in adults. Two landmark studies published this spring in the journal Nature suggest that assumption was catastrophically wrong.
Researchers at Mass General Brigham — the Harvard-affiliated hospital network in Boston — used artificial intelligence to analyze routine CT scans from tens of thousands of adults. What they found stunned even the scientists running the study.
