Perth BioDesign 2019
A 6 months MedTech entrepreneurship program with a multidisciplinary team of doctors, researchers, clinicians, business people, and engineer (me).
I was into machine learning and medtech ever since I had a medical condition misdiagnosed during military service. My condition was misdiagnosed by a young inexperienced doctor (from Singapore’s top university) with a stethoscope – leading to days of pain and discomfort.
While upon visiting my family GP – an experienced ~60yo doctor – he immediately advised me to go to the hospital upon using a stethoscope.
The difference in skill from experience.
I love reading. Especially, when it concerns my health. I read into my condition, the literature, the methods of diagnosis…and found articles about how a concept of ‘machine learning’ applied to chest X-rays could diagnose more accurately than doctors. I related how a model with more (and better) training data was like that experienced doctor I had.
So I got into machine learning in 2015/16.
I came back to Australia always wanting to do something in healthcare with software. The BioDesign program had a strict focus on hardware, but I could still draw the parallels.
I would have liked to explore machine learning for quick eye disease diagnosis – since iPhone cameras were quite good back then already.
Above picture: I am with an anesthesiologist who facilitated me at Fiona Stanley Hospital. I donned scrubs and observed operations in theatre – trying to identify unmet clinical needs. Seeing a live leg amputation really made me appreciate how far medical science has come.
I pushed my limit that semester – doing 1.5 times the normal study load. Proud that I managed to maintain a 92% average mark in university. 🤠
There were parts in the program that was disorganised.
- *Conflict of interests: that diminished being able to leverage our team’s expertise
- Every team is made of multi-disciplinary experts to provide input from respective fields. Our team’s doctor was assigned/volunteered to give a clinical immersion in their speciality for another team. That other team then chose the problem that our doctor had/gave expertise in.
- We were then told we couldn’t work on the same problem our doctor was an expert in, and had to pick something else.
- Improvement:
- allow multiple teams to work on the same problem
- prevent conflict of interests between teams
- We ended up picking a problem we had little medical insights into - around urinary strictures. That coincidentally was also the problem addressed in the previous cohort’s winning team.
Overall, it was a great learning experience. I learnt about the end-to-end scope for a medical device product to go from conception to market. And goodness are patents a minefield in the medtech space. Just as important, I learnt and experienced the factors for success for a team in a long-term project.
I still find it inspiring how stents were made by an engineer. And still resonate with how fundamental health is for anyone – with any transformation in healthcare being able to impact many on a core level.