Torbjörn Lundh wants to see more of problem-based research, where you start with central problems and acquire the knowledge that is needed to solve them, instead of solution-based research where you have a solution and look around for areas to apply it.
Torbjörn has spent a year together with the vascular surgeons at Stanford University in California, where he used engineering methods and mathematics to look at vascular surgical problems. Torbjörn has previously made several inventions as a removable stent, a new bypass-design to even out the shear stress, and a bandage that provides an even predefined pressure. All have come through real problems that a surgeon has given to him. When he was visiting Stanford two years ago in a completely different matter, an educational project in so called team teaching, he discovered the group VIBE Lab (Vascular Intervention Biomechanics & Engineering Laboratory) which contained both engineers and vascular surgeons, and which was doing similar things as himself. After having been invited by them he applied for and got a grant from Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, which paid the extra costs around the stay and made it possible for him to go.
The move was not only between two continents, but also from academy to hospital, a journey that is not as far in the US as in Sweden. Stanford is well known for its education programme in biomedicine where many medtech engineers of the future are educated. Since Torbjörn came to the Department of Mathematical Sciences in 2000 he has moved from research in pure analysis to biomathematics, and now he has taken one step further, through doing medical engineering with mathematical tools. He thinks he has finally found his place under the sun.
Torbjörn participated in the work of the research group and ran various research projects, such as developing a new coordinate system for blood vessels and stents where it is possible to study time dynamic effects and follow a stent during a heartbeat in a visual way. He took part during surgery as an observer to look for possible improvements and therefore had training in medical ethics and secrecy. He also followed lectures in bio design and was co-supervisor for master’s students. Together with the vascular surgeons he looked for problems and tried to solve them, and two of these have led to patent applications. An amusing mathematical problem was to try and predict how a wire, which is used in keyhole surgery, settles in the vascular system.
"I got a very good contact with the doctors, they are extremely good surgeons but have also studied natural sciences on university level and are very open for other subjects than the purely medical. Stanford is also known for engineering entrepreneurship, it is really in the walls. Then, the whole atmosphere is fantastic – the students who are so go-ahead, an environment that bursts with creativity, art, music and sports, and fantastic lectures on all kinds of subjects to visit."
Soon, one of the persons that Torbjörn worked with in Stanford will come to Gothenburg, on November 28 a lecture is given in a Life Sciences seminar on augmented reality, where the surgeon gets continuous physiological information about the patient that he operate upon during the operation through special glasses, and two days later there is a bio design seminar at Sahlgrenska arranged by MedTech West. Torbjörn believes that the examples from Stanford show that there is a huge potential in such collaborations. There already exist several successful collaborative projects here, but Torbjörn compare them to islands, the areas where it would be possible to collaborate are so many more. He also plans an initiative seminar about this next autumn with the area of advance Life Science Engineering, and points out that it should fall well in with the testament of William Chalmers where he as is well known bequeathed most of his money in equal parts to what would become Chalmers and to Sahlgrenska.
Torbjörn has also recently published a book together with Philip Gerlee, Scientific Models: Red Atoms, White Lies and Black Boxes in a Yellow Book, which was published in August. It is about different views on what is a model, and includes among other things interviews with ten researchers in different disciplines of what a model is to them. The book is intended to be culture bridging and provides an explanation to why interdisciplinary projects sometimes can reach a deadlock. The origins of the book was an initiative seminar that was arranged by the Department of Mathematical Sciences in 2010 by the name Scientific Models.