Algorithms in medicine

Question

This is not a question asking for help in any particular programming problem, I hope that it is not blocked, although, as I searched, it has not been published before, and, in addition, this is a topic that I am very close to to my heart.

I would like to break into the field of writing medical algorithms. One of my friends told me the other day that he was working on an algorithm that helps target cancer cells during chemotherapy. I found it fascinating and had never before seen it as a potential career, but now I know that this is all I want to do.

With this in mind, I decided to devote my entire summer vacation to the study of medical algorithms with the aim of potential help to people, as well as to penetrate into this area.

My question is: where to start? I am completely unfamiliar with this aspect of programming and have literally no idea how and where to start. I would really appreciate any help you guys can offer me. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

One friend of mine studied a doctoral dissertation on medical tomography algorithms, and another friend did some research on modeling the spread of the disease, so these are two possible ways you could go. If you are interested in a particular area of ​​medicine, I would suggest you look there first. I think it will be difficult for you to find a field of medicine that could not be affected by algorithms, be it modeling, image processing, analysis, workflow automation or anything else.

More importantly, I think to make sure that you do what you like to do for your own sake. To get a little deep on you, my experience is that you need to do what you do while you do it, to really be happy and really succeed. This is like the difference between wanting to write a book and wanting to write one thing: people who want to write a book about wanting to write, while people who really want to write a book, just write because they like to write. In this case, I would say that more important than working on medical algorithms is to find what you like in programming and find a way to use it in medicine. You will go much further than if you simply tried to solve everything that seems to be an important problem, because of what solution it would create.