My Experience in Hospital!

In short: in April 2020 I went into Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ardabil to build a machine learning system that diagnoses COVID-19 from scans. I ended up admitting patients and scheduling the imaging ward too.

The idea of building machine learning for health is being pushed hard by colleagues all over the world, because a tool like this can make diagnosis quick and accurate. The system got a good reception. The news was picked up by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology website.

What the job actually was

On top of the model, I stayed at the hospital and helped in the imaging section. I admitted new patients to the ward and put the bracelets on their wrists. I did the time scheduling for each patient around the radiologist's availability. That was alongside my other work: improving the data pipelines on the hospital network, and building the AI model to speed up COVID-19 diagnosis.

Doctors and nurses are the main part of the army fighting COVID-19. So is everyone else in the building, from the device suppliers to the janitors. They work hard, indoors, in masks and disposable gloves, all day.

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The tools around the wards

Walking the wards I kept running into genuinely clever devices. I want to point at the things biomedical engineers build to make a medical procedure easier.

Defibrillator, oxygen capsule, nebulizer, ECG. Those are the ones you see everywhere. With a respiratory disease you have to add ventilators to the list.