About Pumps & Pipes
Two of Houston's major industries—medicine and oil and gas–surprisingly have discovered many similarities in the technologies they use and the challenges they face. This discovery prompted a meeting to examine the parallels and determine if there are crossover technologies that could benefit each.
On Nov. 12 2007, in a session called "Pumps & Pipes 1," a group of petroleum, medical, and imaging experts met at the University of Houston's (UH) Texas Learning and Computation Center to explore their similarities in the hope of sparking solutions to problems inherent to both industries.
The invitation-only audience included researchers from medical device manufacturers; computer scientists; imaging specialists; physicists and engineers from academia; geologists, physicists, and researchers from the oil and gas industry; and surgeons, vascular biologists, researchers, and clinicians interested in cardiovascular disease. The room was packed.
The solution to our problems most likely lie in someone else's toolbox–the challenge is in finding it.
A significant problem in medical technology, and perhaps the energy business, is that developers are very in-bred, exposed only to like-thinking individuals, which prevent innovation and maturation of “out of the box” ideas. We believe that great benefit may be gained by exposing cardiovascular and imaging researchers to technology currently available in the oil and gas world. We therefore created a problem-focused forum to analyze issues relevant to both the energy and medical worlds, presenting and discussing with opposite industry counterparts, in an exploration of complementary technologies.
Pumps and Pipes 1
The goal of Pumps and Pipes 1 was to explore opportunities to develop leapfrog technologies between these similar industries, to expose medical researchers and oil and gas engineers to emerging technologies in cardiovascular disease and the energy industry. To do this, we provided an interdisciplinary platform to explore a series of topics with similar technologies and challenges. Each topic had a discussant from both the field of cardiovascular medicine and from numerous companies within the energy sector followed by an open discussion. Our goal was to stimulate discussion and ideas across a wide range of topics since this was the first exchange of this kind. The invited audience of about 130 participants encompassed medical device engineers, cardiovascular physician-scientists from the Texas Medical Center, geologists, metallurgists, bioengineers, computer scientists, and physicists from the University of Houston, Rice University, and Texas A&M. We selected 10 different topics selected for relevance to the different research groups.
Pumps and Pipes 2 : the other guy’s toolkit
Pumps and Pipes 2 was conducted also at the University of Houston and the focus for this forum was " the other guy’s toolkit". This symposium focused on showcasing tools, which could be appropriately focused on the opposite industry. In this forum, we narrowed the focus on to two broad topics: Robotics and Imaging in a well bore and imaging inside a blood vessel.
Pumps and Pipes 3: Better Together
As with our previous Conferences, this collaborative effort to extract potential crossover ideas and technology from the medical, energy, and academic sectors. The theme focused on "Better Together" and the program consisted of four focus areas: i) Pumps; ii) Pipes; iii) Fluids; and iv) Circuits. The invited presenters and audience consisted of scientists, engineers, and clinicians interested in cardiovascular diseases; researchers from the oil and gas industry; scientists and engineers from academia; and research and development specialists from medical device companies.
Pumps and Pipes 4: No Boundaries
Experts from Oceaneering discussed robotic navigation and the innovative tools they have developed for deep-water well intervention. Other topics included materials with memory, robotics and navigation in the body, cardiac valve bioengineering, alternative energy systems and other many topics with potential crossover.
