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Is there any connection between computer science and medical science?

I plan on studying in the medical field, and I was wondering if there was any connection between the two sciences.

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#hospital-and-health-care

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Alejandra’s Answer

Hi Labeat,

There is a huge connection and there will for sure be a demand for more! As we go further into the digital era, we need to adapt the medical field and practice into using that technology. Having a computer scientist that knows how medicine works and the computations needed to make advanced technology is so needed. Think about this, every time you go to the doctor there isn't an actual database that keeps all of your history. Doctors have to still send each other physical paperwork.. and if you go to the hospital on an emergency and can't tell them your history, there is no way for doctors to look this info up if they don't already have access to it.

We're in big need of a boost in the medical field to become more technical, and it's not just for information sharing. Our surgeries are becoming increasingly more microscopic with the advancement of robots, to further this field we need people that know both about robots and the human body. A career like yours would be amazing and in demand to help further the evolution of surgery, who can and can't get surgeries, and how successful these surgeries can become.

I hope that helped and good luck!
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Hanish’s Answer

Yes! There’s absolutely an connection between the two fields. Computer science is used in a lot of applications within the medical field. Pharma and medical companies hire software engineers to build applications and software for their company. Data analysts and scientists use medical data to analyze and predict outbreaks, future illnesses, etc. There’s a particular field called informatics where large data sets ( particularly medical datasets) are used just for these applications. Informatics could be a field you could potentially be interested in, I took an informatics course when I was in college where I had to use computer science algorithms to store and process large scale covid genome data sets. Hope you find this helpful! Good luck :)
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Joseph’s Answer

Pretty much every field uses computer technology these days, and medicine is no exception. A good understanding of the science of how computers operate can be useful to understand what can and can't go wrong, and how to better use that technology safely and securely, whether you're a surgeon using a robot to operate remotely or a nurse keeping patient data organised and secure.

For stronger connections than the obvious "everyone uses computers", some of the subfields of medicine have particular connections to comp-sci.

3D Medical Imaging is a good example, combining medicine, physics, and comp-sci. A CT (Computed Tomography) scanner uses X-Ray scans taken from many angles, and then uses 3D reconstruction algorithms from comp-sci to build that data back into a 3D tomographic array of voxels (the 3D version of pixels).

Neuroscience and psychology is another area where comp-sci has a big role to play. To understand how the brain works, one approach is to compare to simulated neural networks, which is a big development area in comp-sci at the moment.
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