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MEDICAL STUDENT

PERSPECTIVES

IMPROVING MEDICINE WITH MATH AND TECHNOLOGY

By Mouhamed Nashawi

One of the most beautiful qualities of investing a life into a career in medicine is joining
a dynamic field that demands lifelong learning and commitment from its practitioners. Physi-
cians change the medications they prescribe, the surgical methods they perform, and the
guidelines that they use to diagnose patients based on the influx of new data we constantly
receive as an ever-changing society. Upon careful consideration and scrutiny of the latter
data, physicians have been afforded the opportunity to improve their practice of medicine
and fulfill their commitments to their patients to the best of their ability. The emerging
quantitative technologies of today offer the same proposal of an improved practice of med-
icine in ways that borrows from the innovation seen in seemingly exclusive industries such
as information technology or multimedia. The value of these technologies is important to
me, which is why I want to advocate for society’s attention to supporting the pipelines that
will help these technologies find their way into clinics and hospitals.
Prior to starting medical school, I majored in mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. While at a glance, the decision to
take courses such as “MATH 5321- Applied Partial Differential Equations” seemed antithetical to preparing myself for a lifetime of
physical examinations, surgical procedures, or interacting with those struggling to make sense of their lives, I soon learned the opposite
to be true. For me, studying mathematics helped me refine the skill of problem solving. As a medical student, I want to apply these
same skills of problem solving to one day join my colleagues in helping the people of tomorrow take control of their livelihood and
health. Mathematics also afforded me the opportunity to take a glimpse at the future of medicine.
Cancer is one of the most notorious problems affecting our world today with impacts felt in San Antonio. Physicians and healthcare
providers feel the impact of cancer in their patients, irrespective of the specialty that they practice. The most recent Bexar County
Community Health Needs Assessment Report (2016) estimates that the years of potential life lost due to cancer in Bexar County based
on average life expectancy eclipses that of diabetes and coronary heart disease. The contemporary approach to treating cancer is mul-
tidisciplinary with innovations arising in nutrition, physics and chemistry, and even psychology as it pertains to educating patients. Con-
sidering the latter, one of the most robust ways of improving clinical outcomes with patients who have cancer is early detection and
diagnosis, with an emphasis on elucidating specific characteristics of their cancers.
Early detection is now in the works through using mathematical concepts such as machine learning, that take large sets of data
fed into a system, and compare patient values to see where they cluster. For example, tumor biopsies of patients can be analyzed
based on cell dynamics and behavior in vivo to make educated conjectures on the specific cell type a cancer is, which has huge
clinical manifestations in the fields of targeted therapies. Other screening techniques are interested in using statistical methods of
sorting data to improve the efficiency and speed of genetic sequencing to make these technologies more accessible for those who
do not have the socioeconomic luxury of affording innovative cancer therapy. Working on these projects as a college student had
me excited for a career in medicine, and I was even more excited to hear speakers at UT Health San Antonio mirror the same opti-
mism for the future of medicine.
I would like to end this perspectives paper by asking the readers of this magazine to contribute in society’s support for these tech-
nologies. By advocating support for and raising awareness for these technologies, physicians can contribute to persuading private
industry, government, academia, and the healthcare industry to cooperate on efforts that make quantitative therapies not just in cancer,
but in all facets of medicine, more ubiquitous in the future. Moreover, as a medical student, the advent of an improved clinical practice
in the near future is something I am confident in saying that my classmates and I are eager to be able to utilize in our careers.

Mouhamed is an MS1 at UT Health San Antonio. In his free time, he enjoys watching and playing basketball.

32 San Antonio Medicine • January 2018