Teaching soft computing in medicine: an interdisciplinary experiment

The objective of the study was to test the feasibility of teaching some of the many engineering applications within medicine to medical students together with engineering students. A summer school was created in a block-course design that lasted one week. Different teaching modules were divided into lecture and exercise sessions. Several engineering topics combined with medical examples were presented. Half of the students were engineering or computer science students and the other half medical students. The staff of lecturers was also mixed. At the end of the course the students had to pass a Web-based examination and fill out an online evaluation sheet. Most of the students regarded the co-operation between physicians and engineers as very important. The major challenge of the course was the interdisciplinary aspect of teaching: medical students had to learn about methods of information technology and engineering students were exposed to medical information analysis. Teaching both groups of students together resulted in a close collaboration between both groups. The paper highlights some pitfalls and gives recommendations for a similar type of course. In particular, the main recommendation for the future, given the technological advances in medicine, is a closer co-operation with disciplines such as information technology.