Education Highlight A: Pre-College Outreach: Introduction to Computer-Integrated Surgery Course

The Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology offers a pre-college outreach course in Computer-Integrated Surgery (CIS) in the Johns Hopkins Summer Program. The course is designed to captivate the enthusiasm of high school students and undergraduates, with a particular emphasis on attracting female students and other underrepresented minorities. Because of the complexity of the subject and the depth of math and computer programming toolsets needed in the hands-on projects, the course strikes a balance between traditional engineering class work and captivating footage and stories about CIS systems.

The course is designed to introduce the students to the concepts and most relevant issues of CIS. They learn to ask questions and look for answers the way CIS engineers study and build systems. We emphasize multi-disciplinary concepts and systems, introduced through series of novel clinical applications that are currently in use or under development at the CISST ERC and various other institutions. The homework assignments involve mathematical problems that pertain to medical image processing and surgical navigation.

In order to attract a wide spectrum of students, the homework does not require computer programming and the course has no prerequisites. The students compete to take part in an actual clinical experiment. Both the academic quality and the demographic indicators of the course have been improving steadily over the years. The ratio of female students has increased from 25% in 1999 to 46% in 2003. The course has been an important influence on the career choice of the majority of students who have participated. The students are offered recommendations for college application, enabling us to keep a record of students who apply to engineering programs. The course was also featured in the Washington Post Magazine, November 9, 2003.

Further information is available at http://www.cisst.org/~gabor/CS-600-145.htm


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