Ramblings: Lecture at A*Star on Medical Imaging Informatics

I had an interesting session (yesterday) delivering a lecture at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (aka A*STAR).

A*STAR is the lead agency for fostering world-class scientific research and talent for a vibrant knowledge-based and innovation-driven Singapore. A*STAR oversees 14 biomedical sciences and physical sciences and engineering research institutes, and six consortia & centres.

The topic of the lecture was “Medical Imaging Informatics: Trends & Challenges”. 

Under normal circumstances, this is an easy topic for me (and somehow, I keep getting requests to speak on medical imaging although I am quite well-verse in quite a few areas of Health Informatics …) but this session was not a ‘typical’ one.

Let me share more;

• the audience are researchers
• they work in research labs and have no appreciation of hospital workflow
• they are very smart people (doctorates are a norm, some did theirs in hard sciences!)
• they have different focus
• the research perspective is very different from the industry
• the audience comes from different research labs working on (very) different projects

In other words, I had an audience of highly intellectual individuals, each with a particular domain of  interest (we are no longer talking about radiology or cardiology but very diverse yet specific nooks of medical imaging that lean towards the research aspects of things).

As a speaker, it was extremely challenging because I had to make sure everyone walk away with their needs and expectations fulfilled.

So why did I do this, well to be frank, this is not my first lecture for researchers but  I think it is important that we bridge the gap between research and industry. This is the same reason why people are talking about the importance of translational research but I honestly don’t see many people doing anything except talking about it.

So did I managed to ‘please’ everyone – well… no.

One guy walk away halfway during the lecture, however I see a lot of smiling faces when I was done and the overall vibes were good and for sure, some level of knowledge sharing did take place.

So that was how I started my week, delivering a lecture to scientists. Well there are lots of other stuff (e.g. the never-ending tsunami of work) but that is another story for another day.