• Question: What’s one of the most interesting or challenging cases you’ve worked on where your scientific expertise played a key role in the diagnosis?

    Asked by MufaroN on 12 Feb 2025.
    • Photo: Hayley Pincott

      Hayley Pincott answered on 12 Feb 2025:

      Hi,

      I feel my experience and building a set of skills rather than my knowledge has played a part in diagnosing a patients condition. I worked in Oral Pathology & Microbiology, we were the only unit in Wales that dealt with head and neck cancers so it made us very specialist in our field and this allowed me to develop particular skills and learn new techniques to cut thin slices of bone so we could put it on a slide, then stain it to look at under a microscope by a pathologist.

      There was a case where we had a young patient, I had to keep leaving as I found it really upsetting to be dealing with a patient so young. There was another patient, a young adult who had not long finished university, and had to have his eye removed.

      The worst part about my job is knowing that sometimes my best isn’t always good enough, and that a patient may never recover from their cancer diagnosis. However what I can do is consistently do my best to make sure the quality of my work is of a high enough standard that allows other to do their job easily. This makes is easier to give patients the information they need to make choices about their treatment.

      Thank you for a very thought provoking question.

Comments

  • Photo: Edward

    Edward commented on :

    We had a project where we were looking at diesel engines onboard ships. Now, the engines provide the power to drive the boat, but also supply the heat and light for the crew and passenger comforts.
    If the engines fail, it can be really dangerous as the boat is no longer in control.
    We wanted to non-invasively monitor the engine. That means, we don’t want to take it apart first to monitor it. We were able to use magnets to fit vibration sensors to the outside of the engine and use some powerful maths to process these vibration signals to find key indicators that are different in healthy engines and faulty engines.
    We also found that we just needed to know what a healthy engine looks like in order to detect known and unknown faults. This meant we didn’t have to build a dataset with every possible fault, which would be too expensive and time consuming.
    This is the power of machine learning.

  • Photo: Kevin B

    Kevin B commented on :

    I was once responsible for investigating an aircraft crash. We soon established that the cause of the crash (and onboard fire!) was a fuel leak. Our focus was then on finding where the leak occurred, and if a part had failed, we had to warn other aircraft operators. I really had to go back to some basic science to understand about fluid pressures and flow rates, and then do a series of tests and trials to eventually identify where the system had failed. We found out eventually, and I presented my findings to some very senior people in the aircraft industry – who also had to be ‘re-taught’ ab out fluid dynamics. But I was really pleased that the science was good, and we found the fault.