Writings
A searchable chronological archive of writings on data analysis, statistics, artificial intelligence, medicine, digital health, technology, and the humanities. Browse the collection or filter it by topic.
2026
How Well Can a Local 30B Model Answer Medical Questions? Benchmarking Meta Muse Glimmer on an RTX 3090
Published: August 20, 2026
Meta’s Muse Glimmer 30B scored 82.7% on 300 medical benchmark questions when run locally on an RTX 3090. Methods, results, and limitations.
From Chart to Variable: Extracting Computable Clinical Features from the EHR
Published: August 16, 2026
The EHR contains data, not variables. See how derived features like the Vasoactive-Inotropic Score turn messy infusion records into usable clinical data.
Narrative Medicine: Close Reading, Clinical Empathy, and the Art of Listening to Patients
Published: August 8, 2026
Narrative medicine transforms clinical practice through close reading and reflective writing. A guide for physicians from Rita Charon to Oliver Sacks.
The Model Runs, the User Waits: The Paradox of Large Local LLMs
Published: August 3, 2026
Quantisation, RAM offload and tokens per second: why a large local LLM can be less useful than a small model or a hybrid system.
Medicine Before Theory: What the Odyssey Already Knew
Published: July 27, 2026
Medicine in the Odyssey: named healers, drugs that cut both ways, death from grief — a working system with no theory of disease.
DICOM anonymization
Published: July 19, 2026
A practical, standards-based guide to DICOM de-identification: where PHI hides, the PS3.15 profiles, defacing, NIfTI myths, and working Python code.
Open-Weight Medical LLMs
Published: July 14, 2026
MedGemma, Meditron, OpenBioLLM, BioMistral: what the open medical models really offer, what they weigh on disk, and whether they beat a good generalist.
Local LLMs and Clinical Data: Why Privacy Is the Killer Feature in the EU
Published: July 3, 2026
The EU just deferred the AI Act's high-risk rules, but GDPR and clinical liability did not move. Here is why running LLMs locally is the privacy answer.
AI & Digital Health: Quarterly Review 2026Q2
Published: July 1, 2026
From digital-twin hearts with a 100% ablation success rate to LLMs beating FDA-cleared clinical AI, Q2 2026 redrew the line between hype and deployment.
Dante’s Inferno as a Clinical Gaze
Published: June 21, 2026
Read Dante’s Inferno as a surprising archive of medieval medicine, from dropsy and scabies to miasma, hospitals and early public health.
When “Not Worse” Is Enough: Understanding Non-Inferiority Trials in Medicine
Published: June 12, 2026
A clear guide to non-inferiority trials, with examples, confidence intervals, interpretation, and practical questions.
A Day Off From the OR. Or So I Thought
Published: June 10, 2026
Is an RTX 3090 worth it for local AI? I compare RTX 3060 vs RTX 3090 performance with LLMs, Flux and Whisper..
Multi‑Agent AI in Healthcare
Published: June 2, 2026
From chatbots to agentic AI in healthcare: a practical blueprint for multi-persona differential diagnosis, tool use, safety guardrails, and evaluation.
From Hippocrates to Artificial Intelligence
Published: May 27, 2026
An essay on how medicine learned to see disease, from Hippocratic observation and anatomy to pathology, EHRs, and AI.
Natural Language Processing for Medical Report Analysis – Part 3
Published: May 25, 2026
A practical guide to clinical NLP, from TF-IDF and logistic regression to LLMs, hybrid pipelines, validation, and privacy.
Non-Parametric Statistics in Medicine
Published: May 19, 2026
Non-parametric statistics in medicine: Wilcoxon, Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, and Friedman tests with clinical examples and Python.
Natural Language Processing for Medical Report Analysis – Part 2
Published: May 9, 2026
Learn how spaCy and scispaCy enable entity recognition, dependency parsing, and UMLS linking for clinical notes, plus when to combine NLP with regex.
Doctor Zhivago and the Reality of Medicine in Revolutionary Russia
Published: May 4, 2026
A medical reading of Doctor Zhivago, exploring war medicine, infectious disease, scarcity, and medical neutrality in revolutionary Russia.
OpenAI, Healthcare, and the Limits of Access
Published: April 28, 2026
A first look at ChatGPT for healthcare from Europe, with a focus on clinician access, GDPR, and institutional deployment.
Local AI: The LM Studio Surprise
Published: April 26, 2026
LM Studio vs Ollama on a CPU-only laptop: Gemma 4B benchmarks, speed differences, and when to use each tool for local AI.
Local AI: Stress-Testing Local Models on Real Tasks
Published: April 22, 2026
Stress-testing local LLMs on a CPU-only laptop: Gemma 2B vs 4B on coding, reasoning, medical summarization, and diagnosis.
Local AI: Choosing the Right Model for Your Hardware
Published: April 18, 2026
Real Ollama benchmarks on a CPU-only Windows laptop (no GPU): tok/s, latency, and model sizes. Learn which local LLM to choose (Gemma, Phi‑3, Llama).
Local AI: Running LLMs Without Dedicated Graphics
Published: April 14, 2026
Learn how to run LLMs locally on a Windows laptop with CPU-only hardware (no NVIDIA GPU). Step-by-step Ollama install, model picks, and speed checks.
Local Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Published: April 7, 2026
Local AI in healthcare: privacy, governance, RAG, and the practical limits of compliance, evaluation, hardware, and clinical deployment.
AI & Digital Health: Quarterly Review 2026Q1
Published: April 1, 2026
Q1 2026 marks the "Clinical Era" of medical AI: GPT-5 boosts reasoning 29%, robot surgery expands, FDA-EMA align. Full analysis with sources.
OpenClaw and Cowork in Healthcare
Published: March 26, 2026
Explore OpenClaw and Claude Cowork to understand their unique design philosophies in the evolving landscape of agentic AI.
Natural Language Processing for Medical Report Analysis – Part 1
Published: March 15, 2026
Natural language processing for medical reports, part 1: text structure, preprocessing and tokenisation of clinical narrative in Python.
From Smartwatch to ICU: 5 Breakthroughs Revolutionizing Hospital Monitoring
Published: March 9, 2026
Explore how the shift from smartwatch to ICU transforms patient care through wearable technology and artificial intelligence.
Why Clinical Digitalization Fails: A Structural Mismatch Between Medicine and Software
Published: February 27, 2026
Why clinical digitalization fails: the structural mismatch between how medicine actually works and how software is designed and procured.
Bergson’s Time in Acute Medicine
Published: February 7, 2026
Bergson’s concept of time in acute medicine: why trajectories, not timestamps alone, can change the meaning of clinical data.
Frida Kahlo: The Anatomy of Suffering
Published: January 25, 2026
Frida Kahlo between art and medicine: analyzing her paintings as clinical documents of spinal trauma, chronic pain, and the history of orthopedic surgery
2025
Turbo Regression
Published: December 21, 2025
Bootstrap validation and cubic splines in medical regression: a practical guide with clinical examples and Python code.
Multiple Imputation for Missing Data
Published: December 12, 2025
Multiple imputation for missing data in Python: when to use it, how to implement it, apply Rubin’s rules, and report results.
Edvard Munch and Illness: The Ailing Body, the Soul Aflame
Published: November 26, 2025
Edvard Munch, illness, and anxiety: a clinician-aware reading of The Sick Child, The Scream, and Madonna through narrative medicine.
Softmax
Published: November 9, 2025
A practical guide to the Softmax function, from mathematical intuition to machine learning applications, probability and Python examples.
Decision Curve Analysis
Published: November 8, 2025
Decision curve analysis explained: net benefit, bootstrap uncertainty, clinical interpretation, and clear visualization of results.
Orientation in Dicom
Published: October 12, 2025
A practical guide to DICOM coordinates, LPS vs RAS, 3D reconstruction, orientation errors, and fixes for imaging pipelines.
Effect Size
Published: September 20, 2025
Effect size explained: why it matters beyond p-values, how to calculate Cohen’s d, and how to interpret it in research.
Percutaneous Interventions Expand: Key Insights from 2025 ESC/EACTS Guidelines
Published: September 6, 2025
Key takeaways from the 2025 ESC/EACTS guidelines: expanding indications for percutaneous interventions and what changes for surgeons.
Calibration of Predictive Risk Models: A Guide for Clinicians
Published: September 1, 2025
Clinical model calibration explained: calibration plots, ICI, alternatives to Hosmer-Lemeshow, and Platt scaling.
TCP and UDP protocol Benchmarking with Python: From Theory to Practice with FHIR APIs in Healthcare
Published: August 20, 2025
TCP vs UDP in Python: benchmarks, asynchronous networking, and practical considerations for secure healthcare data and FHIR APIs.
Murakami’s metaphorical medicine
Published: August 5, 2025
Illness and healing as metaphor in Murakami's fiction: bodies, dreams and the porous border between medical fact and inner experience.
The Death of the Grandmother in Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”
Published: July 23, 2025
Proust on death and grief: medicine’s limits, symbolic imagery, and the narrator’s transformation after his grandmother’s death.
Create a Medical Database with Docker: Complete Guide with SQLAlchemy, and Flask
Published: July 1, 2025
Build a medical database with Docker, Flask, SQLAlchemy, and MySQL, including ORM mapping and a web interface for patient records.
UNet
Published: May 4, 2025
UNet for biomedical image segmentation: architecture, evaluation metrics, key challenges, and applications in medical imaging.
Sensitivity Analysis
Published: April 4, 2025
Sensitivity analysis explained: how to test whether your conclusions hold when assumptions, methods or excluded cases are changed.
Random Numbers in Python
Published: February 23, 2025
Random number generation in Python: random, NumPy, PyTorch, secrets, and pseudo-random vs true random numbers.
2024
Programming Paradigms in Python
Published: December 8, 2024
Programming paradigms in Python: procedural, object-oriented and functional styles, and which one fits your medical data project.
“The Doctor’s Visit” by Gabriel Metsu
Published: November 27, 2024
Gabriel Metsu’s “The Doctor’s Visit” reveals medicine, illness and the doctor-patient relationship in the 17th century.
Visualizing Statistical Distributions with Python
Published: November 27, 2024
Statistical distributions in Python: visualize normal, binomial, Poisson, t and other distributions with Matplotlib and SciPy examples.
“The Doctor” by Luke Fildes
Published: November 19, 2024
Luke Fildes’ The Doctor: compassionate care, social context, and the painting’s influence on perceptions of the medical profession.
Dr Rieux in Albert Camus’ “The Plague”
Published: November 10, 2024
**Albert Camus’ *The Plague*: Dr. Rieux, medicine, epidemics, and the novel’s metaphor of resistance during Nazi occupation.**
Doctor Grenvil in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata
Published: October 30, 2024
Doctor Grenvil in Verdi's La Traviata: the physician at the bedside of consumption, between compassionate truth and merciful silence.
Inside Dicom
Published: October 29, 2024
Inside Dicom explore advanced techniques for manipulating DICOM images, including normalization, equalization, and edge detection. Learn how to enhance medical image visualization for improved analysis and diagnosis.
“The Scarlet Plague” by Jack London
Published: October 26, 2024
Explore Jack London's prescient 1912 post-apocalyptic novel "The Scarlet Plague," its eerie parallels with modern pandemics, and the timeless lessons it offers on societal resilience, medical preparedness, and the fragility of civilization in the face of global health crises.
F statistic
Published: October 21, 2024
Explore the F statistic's role in ANOVA, including its calculation and interpretation. Learn how it compares between-group and within-group variances to assess significant differences across groups in statistical analysis.
“A Young Doctor’s Notebook” by Mikhail Bulgakov
Published: October 17, 2024
Bulgakov's A Young Doctor's Notebook: the terror of the inexperienced physician, rural Russian medicine and the making of a doctor.
Matplotlib (2)
Published: October 12, 2024
Explore Matplotlib's powerful data visualization capabilities in Python. Learn to create histograms, box plots, scatter plots, and bar charts with code examples. Discover how to customize graphs and enhance your data presentation skills.
Matplotlib (1)
Published: October 12, 2024
Master data visualization in Python with this comprehensive Matplotlib tutorial. Learn to create and customize figures, axes, and plots. Explore essential graph types including histograms, box plots, scatter plots, and bar charts with practical code examples.
Docteur Cottard in Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”
Published: October 9, 2024
Explore Proust's scathing critique of medicine through Dr. Cottard in 'À la recherche du temps perdu'. Discover how this character embodies the paradox of medical brilliance and human blindness, offering insights into empathy, ethics, and the limitations of clinical detachment in healthcare.
Character Encoding
Published: October 1, 2024
Explore the fundamentals of character encoding, from ASCII to Unicode. Learn about various encoding systems, their evolution, and importance in digital communication. Discover how to detect and convert encodings using Python libraries like chardet and charset-normalizer.
Moments
Published: September 24, 2024
Statistical moments explained: mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis, what each says about a distribution, and how to compute them.
Elixir of Love: Udite, udite rustici
Published: September 17, 2024
Explore Donizetti's comic opera "The Elixir of Love" through the aria "Udite, udite rustici". Discover how the charlatan Dulcamara embodies 18th and 19th-century medical quackery, offering a satirical lens on historical medical practices and the transition to evidence-based medicine.
The Barber of Seville by Gioacchino Rossini
Published: September 13, 2024
Explore Rossini's comic masterpiece "Il barbiere di Siviglia," a witty tale of love, disguise, and intrigue. This opera buffa satirizes 18th-century society, particularly through the character of Dr. Bartolo, offering a humorous critique of medical practices and social norms of the era.
The Medical Inspection by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Published: September 5, 2024
Toulouse-Lautrec's The Medical Inspection: the brothel health check, the clinical gaze and the body reduced to an object of control.
How many Sums of Squares we’re dealing with in Repeated Measures ANOVA?
Published: September 4, 2024
Explore the different types of Sums of Squares in Repeated Measures ANOVA, including Type 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Understand their calculations, applications, and implications for statistical analysis, especially in unbalanced designs and complex experimental setups.
SQL databases
Published: August 31, 2024
Explore essential SQL database interactions in Python using libraries like sqlite3, mysql-connector, psycopg2, and SQLAlchemy. Learn to efficiently manage structured data, perform CRUD operations, and leverage the power of relational databases for large-scale data analysis and manipulation.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
Published: August 12, 2024
Explore Edgar Lee Masters' groundbreaking "Spoon River Anthology," a collection of poetic epitaphs revealing the hidden lives and health struggles of a fictional Midwestern town.
Mozart aria “Eccovi il medico, signore belle”
Published: July 31, 2024
Explore the historical context and satirical elements of Mozart's aria "Eccovi il medico signore belle" from Così fan tutte. Discover how this piece critiques 18th-century medical practices, including mesmerism, and reflects the tension between science and pseudoscience in medicine.
Python Environments
Published: July 30, 2024
Explore Python environments, virtual environments, and package management. Learn about PyPI, Conda, dependency management, and best practices for isolating project dependencies. Essential guide for Python developers.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Published: July 23, 2024
Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp: dissection as public spectacle and the birth of the modern anatomical gaze.
Exploring DICOM
Published: July 17, 2024
An introduction to the DICOM standard: how medical images and metadata are structured, and how to read and explore them with Python.
Python in Healthcare Data
Published: July 14, 2024
Why Python became the standard for healthcare data: key libraries, interoperability with FHIR and DICOM, and typical clinical workflows.
No writings found.