Week 4 (Jason Chang)


The more time I spend in the Neuroscience ICU, the more I realize how much round-the-clock work is required by the care nurses and physicians. Despite some patients being in vegetation states with no realistic hope of restoring life-sustaining functions, clinicians continue to monitor vital signs and perform neurocognitive assessments until the patient is declared brain-dead. I also learned that a new neurocritical care fellow and group of residents, most of whom are in emergency medicine or anesthesiology, will rotate through the Neuroscience ICU every week. Surprisingly, I have noticed that while each fellow typically follows a similar systematic approach, the efficiency and pacing during rounds is predominantly determined by how clearly the fellow structures the agenda and has the residents present their information.

On Wednesday, I expressed to Dr. Mangat my concern that the high-level programming and signals processing required for my project was preventing me from making any significant progress towards developing an automated artifact removal method in MATLAB. We decided to use an individual component analysis (ICA) script developed by Dr. Forgács’ lab to analyze EEG signals in each of the electrode channels. Using ICA, EEG signals are decomposed into additive, independent subcomponents to isolate artifacts and cognitive processes present in the data. However, ICA must be applied to all the channels and cannot be performed selectively, or else signal differences can be introduced into the data. This is potentially problematic since I am focusing on the frontal channels, which typically contain ocular artifacts (e.g. blinking and eye rolling), and different types of artifacts, such as muscle and cardiac activity, can be found in other areas of the brain.


I am having some difficulties running the ICA script on the pre-selected EEG data files, but I hope to have results later today or by early next week at the latest to present to Dr. Mangat. Next week, I also hope to start observing orthopaedic trauma surgeries at WCMC. 

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