If a surgical robot needs to know exactly where your bones are, there are currently two options. Take repeated X-ray images and accept the radiation. Or drill metal pins into the bone and track markers mounted on them.

Ahmed Sewify spent his PhD working on a third option: put an ultrasound probe on the skin and see through to the bone underneath.

In this episode Kenneth Cutbush talks with Ahmed, a biomedical engineer who has just completed a PhD in 3D ultrasound imaging of the shoulder, about a path that took him through five countries and about seven internships before he found the field he wanted.

He was born in Egypt, the son of an intensive care physician whose work moved the family repeatedly: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, back to Egypt, then Abu Dhabi. At sixteen he left for Malaysia alone, and later moved to Brisbane without knowing a single person there.

He is a native Arabic speaker who taught himself English by mimicking Taylor Swift songs, then working up to Eminem when that got too easy. He also speaks Japanese and French. He is about to add Danish, having just been recruited to a position in Denmark.

The internship section is genuinely useful for any engineering student listening. He went through IT, mechanical, electronics and defence before landing at a biomedical company and realising that was it. He paid $2,000 out of his own pocket for one of them.

The research itself is remarkable. A feasibility study proving a shoulder could be reconstructed in three dimensions from ultrasound at all. Then automating it with a robot arm and deep learning. Then a cadaver study validating skin-mounted ultrasound tracking against endocortical bone pins, the gold standard, and finding it worked.

His father's advice runs through the whole episode: never say no to an opportunity. Say yes and figure it out afterwards.

Chapters

  • 00:00 Why bone tracking currently means radiation or drilled pins
  • 00:46 Welcome, a PhD in 3D ultrasound of the shoulder
  • 01:20 Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, a childhood on the move
  • 02:03 Leaving for Malaysia at sixteen
  • 02:45 Arriving in Brisbane knowing nobody
  • 03:51 Learning English from Taylor Swift, then Eminem
  • 05:06 Mechatronics, robotics, and going "crazy with internships"
  • 05:28 How an internship actually works in engineering
  • 06:19 The IT job where he unplugged routers for a living
  • 07:22 Paid, unpaid, and paying $2,000 to work
  • 08:39 Defence, weapons systems, and why it did not sit right
  • 09:10 Finding biomedical engineering at last
  • 11:38 A master's he swore he would never do
  • 12:07 A PhD he swore he would never do either
  • 12:56 Ultrasound's real limitation: field of view
  • 14:29 Proving you can reconstruct a shoulder in 3D
  • 15:28 Two sonographers, one blinded, and the first scans
  • 16:57 Bringing in AI to automate it
  • 19:03 Attaching an ultrasound probe to a robot arm
  • 21:42 Three projects, and the pressure to publish
  • 22:16 Leading an interdisciplinary project across programs
  • 27:11 Seeing through skin to bone, the cadaver study
  • 27:32 Testing it against endocortical bone pins
  • 29:38 Submitting, then straight into a postdoc
  • 32:46 The brutal ten-minute interview, and "go deeper, not wider"
  • 35:41 Recruited to Denmark
  • 35:53 The centre that brought all of it together