Week Six: Soccer Sheets

Another week of being immersed has come to an end and so has the week of coding. Now last week issues arose through differences in version numbers, but this week has been a different kind of coding. While I have my functions running gather data from different files, I have been coding in the sense that I have been assigning different values for different events seen in pathology reports. As that sentence suggests, this week has been a lot of looking over pathology reports to get out data regarding biopsy results. This has led to many hours spent on Excel putting in parameters related to prostate biopsies such as the Gleason scores (the pathological score given regarding the degree of differentiation related to cancer in prostate tissue). As a result, I have looked at several pathology reports to build the database related to my research. Fortunately, I have had some help with the rising second year medical students that have been working on this project with me. Without them this would be taking a lot longer, especially with the various bugs that arise in my program that call for my attention. If it were not for them then this would be a much larger undertaking.

Now beyond building this database, I had a chance to go to the clinic and see a donor nephrectomy. This is the surgery where a kidney from a donor is removed for a kidney transplant. The surgery in this instance was laparoscopic like many of the other surgeries I have observed. Fortunately, as I have learned more anatomy and recalling those anatomy classes taken a long time ago I could for the most part follow a decent chunk of this surgery. I could identify the colon, kidney, and spleen with no issue along with some of the arteries and veins. Once the kidney was removed, it was taken to the OR with the recipient, but due to the size of the room, I decided not to continue viewing the surgery.


While a decent chunk of my time has been spent in front of a computer this week, I did have a chance to go see some of the views around New York. I visited Yankee Stadium this week to watch New York City FC play against the Chicago Fire in an MLS game. I saw the sunrise from Brooklyn Bridge after staying up all night looking for rooftop bars and eating Korean food. The one thing though to remember was the bamboozle I experienced when I went to get meatballs yesterday. A group of us went out to eat and decided to get some meatballs. It was a sort of pick what you want combo kind of restaurant with several sides listed on the menu. After one quick question, we thought it was unlimited sides all for $6, which we thought was a deal right? Wrong! It was $6 per side, which was to our surprise once we got the check. That was the most I had to pay for dinner here and it was by pure accident. Beyond the bamboozle, I have decided that my search for coffee is probably done as I only tend to go to Gregory’s each day. This also is aided by the fact that I have gotten busier with my project that limits the time I have to search for new coffee shops at reasonable times for coffee. With that I will end this post with the picture I took at sunrise.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week7

With the end of our summer immersion approaching, I feel sad to say goodbye to all the persons I've met in the hospital during this summer. The past 7 weeks has been very fulfilling and exciting to me, and I will never forget my experience here. As a student will electrical engineering background, I never thought that I can be able to go to a real operation room in the hospital and observe doctors operating on surgeries. But in the past 7 weeks, I was able to go to OR every week, and there's always surgery techniques that are impressing to me. Beside clinical experience, I also had a research project, automatic segmentation of zebra fish neuron images. As I have presented in my previous bloggers, for my project, I have tried several different algorithms. The first is simple thresholding. It is usually used as a preprocessing step in image analysis. The second method is watershed algorithm. It works pretty well, but, it's very sensitive to noise, resulting in over segmenta
Read more

Week 5: Spine Surgeries and Excel Files

Image
On the context of my clinical research project, I continue extracting the different demographic and skeletal specific factors for the patients of our study. I was also able to attend an additional spinal fusion surgery under the supervision of Dr. Kim at HSS. During this week, I was particularly interested in the surgical equipment that he uses for the procedure. Dr. Kim uses the Zimmer Biomet Vitality Spinal Fixation System for his spine surgeries. The components of the system are made from medical grade titanium alloy and medical grade cobalt chromium alloy. In summary, these were the main steps of the process for installing the screws into the patient spine which, personally, was the most interesting part of the procedure.  Initially, the pedicle area of the vertebrae is localized, and an insertion is made in the cortical shell. Then, a probe, included with the system, creates a pathway for the polyaxial pedicle screw to be inserted into the pedicle and the vertebral body. It i
Read more

Week 6 (Jason Chang)

Image
With only a week of immersion left, I have been focusing all my time on developing a preliminary proof-of-concept protocol for automating EEG artifact removal in MATLAB. Admittedly, it has been very challenging at times, especially given my limited neurology and programming experience, but I have made significant progress as of recently with the assistance of Dr. Mangat and Dr. Forgács. Last week, I began using EEGLAB, an interactive EEG analysis toolbox in MATLAB, to perform independent component analysis (ICA) on selected datasets from the subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) study. After ICA is applied, EEGLAB has different built-in signals processing functions to mark and remove components containing any artifacts. With several methods to choose from, I consulted with Dr. Forgács on Thursday to seek his clinical expertise. Figure 1 . Individual component analysis (ICA) to reject artifacts by visual inspection of continuous EEG signals  Figure 2. Removing ICA components using
Read more