Part 1: Signal, Noise, and Metrics — We’re in the era of metrics — measure it, do it a lot of times, ???, answer everything! Including how to live forever! Obviously that’s too good to be true. But it’s worth chasing at least, right? In this post I’ll talk about three common misunderstandings we’re seeing today related…

Two ways to break down the problem — Whether you’re in science, medicine, or engineering, you’re trying to understand systems. A system is something that takes an input and gives an output. The system may have a lot of parts inside of it that are involved with transferring inputs into outputs. …

From hardware to states to clinical symptoms — Our job as physicians is to take care of people in their multi-layered complexity. That means we need to understand how each of the layers affect each other. In Part 1 and Part 2 we laid the foundations of systems medicine. The idea is that we can analyse anything, even…

Setting up Docker + devcontainer in your neuro-code — Containers are great, even for your code. You put your code into a container, it can last forever. Let’s talk briefly about what a container is, and why you should set up a container for all of your code this very instant and forever. What is a Container? Containerization sets up an isolated sandbox…

How your body works, and how it can break — Let’s continue our effort to distill medicine into fundamental (engineering) principles — in Part 1 we set the foundations with what a system was and different levels of understanding the system. In this post I’m going to talk about two of the core concepts in medicine: physiology = how the…

Studying the systems of medicine in finer focus — I just finished studying for STEP2 and recently found out I passed. While I decided not to apply for residency towards the beginning of COVID, after seeing what can only be described as a clown-car, I did love going through medical training as an engineer. It was hard, but I…

Part 1: Action towards understanding — This is a very big decade for neural interfaces — they’re finally leaping out of science fiction and into the public’s eye. What an exciting new technology! Turns out, we’ve been engineering and using neural interfaces for 50+ years, often to restore function in severely ill patients. …

Finding relationships through convoluted data — Data is a window into something you actually care about. If you’re listening to a patient’s heart, the sound waves are data. But you really care about the heart valves you can’t see or touch directly. So data is useful, but it can be misleading. This is unavoidable. The best…

Part 1: A view from engineering — Surgery’s a vividly visible part of medicine — every medical television show has an arrogant surgeon somewhere in the mix. It makes for compelling television, and it definitely makes an impression, but what’s surgery really like? Here are a few things I came away with from my third/fourth year surgery…