Steven Keating

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Have you ever taken a “selfie”? Likely so – we all take photos of ourselves on trips, activities, and we share the data with friends. But what about a medical “selfie”? Are you curious about your own medical data and would you share it? What if it could save your life or millions of others?

For Steven Keating, his medical “selfie” saved his life through the accidental discovery of a baseball-sized astrocytoma brain tumor found in a voluntary academic scan. With his tumor successfully removed through awake brain surgery in 2014, Steven is an advocate for open patient data and curiosity. He asks if hospitals could have a “share” button to improve patient care, advance medical research, and reduce hospital costs. He will be talking on patient data access, generation, and sharing – with examples ranging from staining his own brain, 3D printing skulls, genetic sequencing, microbiome analysis during chemotherapy, and surgery/proton radiation videos. Steven is advocating for patients as partners in their own care. He is focused on reducing barriers for data access, implementing open APIs, and incentivizing patient interaction through sharing. Steven is currently pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Synthetic Biology at the MIT Media Lab.