If you ask me who are my favorite students i would say i love teaching doctors , biomedical engineers as well as technicians . But there is one group which stands unique in my clientale . They are the software engineers . Now you may ask me what am i doing in teaching them ? Thanks to technological advancement many core areas of engineering as well as core areas of medicine has become interdisciplinary .
One such area is PACS . Computers and softwares are involved in storing , transmitting and processing medical images these days . Gone are the days when a single xray film was the end of the diagnosis . These days thousands of images are produced by CT scanners and they are sometimes even transmitted across continents for a report . And in this process both the doctors as well as the non doctors involved should be familiar with each other so that the process is efficient .
As radiologists medical physics is part of the curriculum though dont have to go into high end maths. Similarly any engineer working in medical domain should have a working knowledge of medical domain and radiology domain .
Its like doing business between india and brazil . Business between both countries will go smooth only if both understand each other . In international business , languages like english helps in this communication as well as a few local language words . But in a mission critical process like medicine its important that doctors and engineers understand each other so that better products are designed and used .
For software engineers in medical field who are developers or in sales role a basic birds eye view understanding of CT and MRI will take them leagues into" foreign " territory seamlessly . Technologies like DICOM which helps scanning machines in communicating with each other is already in use . But for doctors and engineers to talk to each other seamlessly still no software is made . The only solution is both understanding some aspects of the other field . It is in this area i get my favorite students the engineers . Actually the better term is one of the favorites as teaching radiologists , technologists and biomedical engineers each is uniquely interesting . And of course the future Bill gates of the medical software field the software engineers is really exciting to teach .
