Algorithms in medicine

This is not a question asking for help with any particular programming problem, I hope it is not locked though as I have searched and it has not bee开发者_运维技巧n posted before, and in addition it is a topic I hold very close to my heart.

I would like to break into the field of writing medical algorithms. An acquaintance of mine told me the other day that he has been working on an algorithm to help with the targeting of cancer cells in chemotherapy. I found this fascinating and had never before contemplated this as a potential career - but now I know it is all that I want to do.

With this in mind, I have elected to dedicate the entirety of my Summer vacation to studying medical algorithms with a view to potentially helping people, and also to break into that field.

My question is, where do I begin? I am completely unfamiliar with this aspect of programming and have literally no idea how, or where to begin. I would really appreciate whatever help you guys can offer me. Thanks a lot.

A friend of mine did his PhD research on medical tomography algorithms, and another friend did some research on modeling disease spread, so those are two possible ways you could go. If there's a particular area of medicine you're interested in, I'd suggest you look there first. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an area of medicine that couldn't in some way be touched by algorithms, whether that be in modeling, imaging, analysis, workflow automation, or something else.

What's more important, I think, is to make sure you're doing something you like doing for its own sake. To get a little deep on you here, my experience has been that you have to like doing what you're doing while you do it to really be happy and to really succeed. It's like the difference between wanting to write a book and wanting to have written one: people who want to have written a book talk about wanting to write, while people who actually want to write a book just write one because they enjoy writing. In this case, I'd say more important than working on medical algorithms is to find what you like about programming and find a way to put that to use in medicine. You'll go much further than if you just try to tackle whatever seems like an important problem because of what solving it would produce.