Music in Medicine

What happens in the brains of Grammy-nominated musicians while they perform together, in front of a live audience?

At MD Anderson Cancer Center, live concerts are part of the hospital experience. They are organized by the Music-in-Medicine Initiative, a program founded and directed by Dr. Mei Rui, concert pianist and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, which studies music as a clinical intervention for patients, caregivers, and providers.

Taking Brain Imaging to the Concert Hall

Through a collaboration between the Music-in-Medicine Initiative and the UH BRAIN Center, these concerts also became recording sessions. The UH team took mobile brain-body imaging out of the lab and into the concert space, recording brain and body activity from performers and audience members as the music unfolded. Every concert meant setting up inside a working hospital, synchronizing multiple participants, and capturing data from live performances by extraordinary musicians.

Presentations

This project has been shared through an oral presentation at Arizona State University and a poster presentation at the IAB meeting.

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Open Data

Our data descriptor, MoBI-Music, is published in IEEE Data Descriptions. It documents an open dataset of brain and body recordings from professional musicians during real performances, the kind of setting that is usually out of reach for neuroscience.

The data is open for anyone working on music, the brain, brain-computer interfaces, or creativity.

Read the MoBI-Music data descriptor

Access the Music in Medicine dataset on figshare

Partner Institutions

• University of Houston, BRAIN Center
• The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Music-in-Medicine Initiative

About the Music-in-Medicine Initiative

The Music-in-Medicine Initiative leads its own research program, including clinical trials on music-based interventions in oncology and surgery. Selected work from Dr. Mei Rui and her team:

• Huynh A, Noll K, Ray WJ, Lang FF, Rui M. Toward precision music medicine in oncology care: reproducible, scalable and biomarker-driven interventions. eClinicalMedicine, 2026.
• Rui M, Lee JE, Vauthey JN, Conrad C. Enhancing surgical performance by adopting expert musicians’ practice and performance strategies. Surgery, 2018.
• Dr. Mei Rui’s faculty profile at MD Anderson

In the News

• At MD Anderson, Surgery Patients Benefit From Musical Prescriptions (Texas Monthly)
• The Concert Pianist Building The Science Of Music Medicine (Forbes)
• What is music medicine? (MD Anderson Cancerwise)