The guy is right, we should learn more about... everything, really. The most interesting scientific discoveries have been from people gluing two radically different branches of science and/or math together in weird ways.
And then you have someone like me that just learns everything about everything, and wonders why the sun is going down and I just got out of bed at oh-shit-I've-been-reading-Wikipedia-for-8-hours-Goddamnit o'clock.
One thing to note: he was up-front about not being a doctor. I think that sort of honesty is a small ethical obligation of wandering into a conference for doctors. But it also means that the people you talk to can target their explanation to their audience.
These types of procedures are exploding, but there's a lot of turf wars between vascular surgery, cardiac surgery and interventionalists (e.g. interventional radiologists, interventional cardiologists, and interventional neurologists).
For vessels in the brain there are fellowships that accept neurologists, radiologists, and/or neurosurgeons:
It's kinda unique to have that kind of diversity in a fellowship applicant pool. I'm interested in interventional radiology, but their big problem is that they don't oversee the patient's floor management. This will hopefully change with the new IR residency for medical students starting next year:
I would suggest going to a big bioinformatics conference like ISMB or ECCB. The amount of graphics / images / pictures that goes into genomics / biology / genetics posters is amazing. I moved from pure CS to Genomics, and the differences are quite stark.
Man I was really sad that the link to the sock con was down and the writeup on the other programmer's visit to said con was missing. Anyone else been to a sock con?
And then you have someone like me that just learns everything about everything, and wonders why the sun is going down and I just got out of bed at oh-shit-I've-been-reading-Wikipedia-for-8-hours-Goddamnit o'clock.