About
This is a place for things I read, write, and do; generally within the themes of medicine, technology, books, and recently 3D printing.
Please feel free to get in touch about anything on or off this site.
Latest
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The People's Phantom
An open-source blueprint for democratising ultrasound-guided procedural training
Ultrasound-guided vascular access is now a core procedural skill for anaesthetists and intensivists. Teaching it well requires practice on something that behaves like tissue — something that resists the needle, returns recognisable echoes, and lets learners make mistakes without consequences. Commercial phantoms do this. They also cost several hundred pounds each, degrade with use, and generate a meaningful quantity of non-recyclable silicone waste when they reach the end of their life.
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Argus
Building a wearable medication safety system from off-the-shelf hardware
Medication errors are one of the more uncomfortable facts of clinical practice. They happen in approximately 10% of ICU patient days, and roughly half of those errors occur at the point of administration — not in prescribing, not in dispensing, but in the final step, when the drug actually reaches the patient.
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AI in Anaesthesia
A domain expert on your shoulder
Artificial intelligence already has changed anaesthesia. Before we called it AI, we called it machine learning, and before that it was simply statistics. These lie on a continuum of methods that allow us to offload thinking. We use their products daily in the form of risk calculators, pharmacokinetic models, and waveform analysis.
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Minerva
Can large language models write indistinguishable primary FRCA questions?
Single best answer questions are the backbone of written medical examinations. They are reliable to mark, hard to game, and well-suited to testing clinical reasoning across a broad curriculum. They are also expensive and slow to produce. Writing a good SBA requires a subject matter expert, familiarity with the examination format, careful calibration of the distractors, and usually several rounds of review before anything goes near a candidate.
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What to get the Person who has Everything?
Printing my brother's skull for fun and profit
It’s that time of year. The one when you’re desperately trying to think of present ideas for your nearest and dearest – maybe they’ve given you a few ideas, maybe they have hobby which requires a steady supply of supporting materials, or maybe you’re just doing booze this year. Just possibly you’ve bought yourself a 3D printer, and are desperately shoehorning printed presents into people’s stockings. So that’s how I came to be printing my brother’s skull.