Here We Go Again

Examination period is over and I could not be happier! To be honest, when ETH exams were getting closer I was not quite sure about whether I was going to make it. At the end, however, all the sleepless nights and tense moments added up to lots of new knowledge and some nice grades in my transcript so I really feel all this effort has been worth it.

In addition, the Spring Semester 2017 is starting tomorrow and I am really excited about it! In the next few months I will learn about Game Theory, Theory, Programming and Simulation of Neuronal Networks, Statistics for Experimental Research and Wearable Devices among many others.

If I had to pick only two I would go for Industry and Competitive Analysis which teaches you a very practical set of methods to quickly obtain a good grasp of an industry. By the end of the course, I should be able to understand factors that impact on the financial performance of an industry as well the financial performance of firms within it.

The second course I am very thrilled about is High Tech Start-up Management, a seminar organized by the HSG and the ETH that gives insights into conceptual knowledge and methods for the development of scalable business models. Since it is not a regular course, it had an individual application process so I am really proud they selected me!

What have I been up to these days? Well, after finishing the exams I flew back to Barcelona and started putting together my brand new 3D printer. I still have to callibrate it (which will be a major headache) but you can already see the pictures of the assembling process and the first prints!

Furthermore, I kept working on the pulmonology project (let us call it DeepBreath from now on) and even though we had a lot of trouble cutting the respiratory cycles (and this is the reason why the classifiers were not performing as intended) it seems that we have finally found a proper way to do it. As you can see, the preliminary results look promising:

Finally, Medmake (the association I co-founded with my colleague Joan Puig) was hired by Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Althaia (Manresa, Spain) to teach a group of twenty-five extremely motivated doctors how to turn medical images such as CT or MRI scans into 3D models that can be printed afterwards. The best part is that it does not end here: there will be an incoming session in which we will sit together with these doctors again and discuss their particular clinical cases.

Last time I did such a collaboration was an incredible success. Together with the cardiology team from Hospital Clínic (Barcelona, Spain) we developed an intervention planning system to aid TAVI procedures.

Do not know what TAVI means? Transcatheter aortic-valve implantation (TAVI) is a technique that provides an alternative for high-risk patients in need of an aortic valve replacement. Currently, the only clinical effective treatment for severe aortic stenosis is valve replacement but, unfortunately, one-third of the patients cannot undergo surgery because of several risk factors. TAVI provides an alternative for such patients.

More than 40.000 transcatheter implantations have been done since 2012 and the potential market is large. However, TAVI procedures are about 20.000€ more expensive per patient and in one-third of cases there are complications afterwards. Good news are that these potentials adverse effects could be partially avoided improving patient selection, intervention planning and aortic sizing with the support of medical imaging. This is why we builded up an intervention planning system that will help cardiologists to find the more well-suited implant for each patient. If you are curious about it, please take a look at our published article!

In conclusion, I strongly believe this kind of interdisclinary collaboration between technical and medical professionals is critical to solve the current and future healthcare challenges and I can only celebrate the hospital’s commitment.

 

Winter is coming!

Winter is coming, ladies! Winterfell or Zürich I am dying of cold and it seems the worst is yet to come. However, I will not let anything spoil the moment because I am having such an incredible time..!

It has been a couple months since I started my masters at ETH and I am finally getting the hand of it. I have also learned a lot about Linux these last days and it is, indeed, not as difficult as it might seem although the learning curve is pretty steep at the beginning. This just means it will take you a bit longer to fall in love with your operating system.

Another big discovery has been Bastli, which I find one of the coolest places at ETH. Bastli is the electronics laboratory of AMIV (Akademische Maschinen- und Elektro-Ingenieur Verein) and it offers students free workplaces and tools to implement your own projects and ideas.

Among many other cool stuff, they have a couple of 3D printers which is great because it means that even though I am not in Barcelona anymore I can keep helping in social initiatives I love like «E-nabling the Future» or «The Hand Challenge». Actually, I am going back to Barcelona in a couple weeks because, as I told you in a previous post, I am the co-founder of Medmake, an association that offers 3D printing services and products for healthcare professionals. We have collaborated with several regional hospitals, organized 3D printing courses and taken part in a wide range of social initiatives to promote technology among girls like </Girls in the lab>. We even made it to the national TV recently! So as you ladies can guess, we are pretty excited about it.

This time the American Embassy from Madrid has invited us to the inauguration ceremony of the «American Space» in Barcelona. We will be in charge of a technical workshop for kids and teens to motivate them to go into computer science or engineering when they grow up. Awesome, right?

However, it does not end here! I came to Zürich to become a medical innovator, to find a team of people that truly believe there is nothing impossible and start working on something great. And this is precisely what I have been doing: interviewing several doctors to find real world needs, screening the needs they mentioned, brainstorming to come up with possible solutions, selecting the winner idea… and I am finally ready to begin the implementation part.

Unfortunately, I cannot give you ladies many details about the project yet (otherwise I would be doing a public disclosure!) but I promise you all it is an amazing software project that will give me the chance to use and improve a lot my machine learning skills to help pulmonologists (i.e. doctors in respiratory medicine).

If we succeed, the idea is to patent the software and develop a b usiness model around it but we still have a long hard way to go! Innovating in the medical field is certainly not easy but there are some resources that can be very helpful (like the book «Biodesign: the process of innovating medical technologies» by Yock, Zenios, Makower et al.) and the great reward of knowing you are working to improve the quality of many lives.