Sunday, January 25, 2015

Coding Responsibly Part I: Version Control

GitHub is a great version control resource. Source
As a result of the growing number of resources allowing everyone to learn how to code, as well as numerous other awesome educational efforts, programming is steadily growing in popularity and accessibility. In previous posts, I have offered some resources I found helpful for learning to code, and have even started offering some workshops for my colleagues here at the University of Pennsylvania (find slides here). But what is the next step after getting the basics down? The answer is to make sure you don't just code, but that you learn to code responsibly.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

A Recent Review of How Today's Clinicians Are Treating Fractures

[WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT]

Open fractures are bone fractures in which the bone breaks through the skin, leaving it exposed to the external environment (see figure below for example). As you can imagine, this exposure leaves the fracture particularly vulnerable to infection and other related complications, including an inability of the bone to heal properly. When treating these wounds, the orthopedic treatment teams (surgeons, nurses, and others) attempt to prevent infection using wound classification, prophylactic antibiotics, irrigation, and other methods. Despite these efforts, infections and related complications still plague fracture patients. In a recent publication, my collaborators and I outlined the current paradigms in open fracture treatment, the infectious challenges facing those treatments, and the future of patient care.