Week 5 (Jason Chang)

This week has been one of many firsts – some firsts for my immersion experience and some firsts simply for me. This past weekend, I went back home to Dallas to run a half-marathon with my old professors and lab mates from the University of Texas at Dallas. Despite having to run in the sweltering Texas heat, I was proud of myself for sticking it out and successfully finishing my first (and hopefully not last) race.

 
Figure 1. Post-race photo with (from left to right) my Feedback Systems instructor, undergraduate PI, and a PhD student in my old lab

After returning to NYC, I spent the first half of the week observing OR procedures for the first time with Matthew and his clinical mentor, Dr. Jason Spector, in the Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Department at WCMC-NYP. I watched a total of five procedures, including the excision of an unknown mass (which was later identified as calcified fatty tissue), the placement of lumbar drain tubes to minimize post-operative swelling, and a flap delay procedure of a patient’s pectoral skin in preparation for potential reconstruction. While in the OR, Dr. Spector would ask the medical students questions about the patients’ conditions and have them explain their answers to Matthew and me, which I appreciated since I often got lost just watching the surgeons cleanly cut and suture with incredible speed. Since the patients in the Neuroscience ICU are all pre- and post-op, I am glad that I had this opportunity to see this other side of medical treatment.

For my research project under Dr. Mangat, I am also excited to report that I have analyzed my first EEG dataset! Previously, I was having a lot of problems running my independent component analysis (ICA) script with EEGLAB, an interactive EEG analysis toolbox in MATLAB. Now, I have decided on a specific set of analysis parameters to identify, mark, and remove EEG artifacts post-ICA processing of each channel.

Figure 2. A selfie with my 2D scalp maps generated after initial EEG artifact removal using independent component analysis (ICA)

ICA analysis on one EEG dataset can take up to an hour, so I plan to keep running my code over the weekend and next week. Although the processed EEG tracings are now relatively clean, they still contain a considerable number of artifacts in some channels. An additional ICA analysis may need to be applied to these ‘pruned’ datasets to better isolate the signals of interest. Afterwards, I plan to meet with Dr. Mangat to go through the frequency spectra of my datasets to determine whether the artifact removal was performed effectively.


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. ...
Read more

Week 5: Prostates & Autopsies

Image
This was a fun and interesting week! The prostate biopsy chip slides from last week were evaluated, and more testing was done. On Wednesday and Thursday, two people from the company were here to do some trials with the new chips. This time, real prostate biopsies were taken, and sections were used to evaluate the quality of the tissue. Each chip holds up to 6 biopsies inside the little grooves. The color of the dividers (blue, yellow, and black) orient each sample to distinguish where in the prostate each biopsy came from. It also allows six biopsy cores to be placed on one slide which saves space and resources [1]: Instead of all 12 of the slides on the left (although that is a little excessive), you just need two with the BxChip. It also seems to keep the cores flat and aligned. This is what a magnified core might look like [2]: The tissue fits right inside the little grooves (although it can be slightly difficult to get them in there), and then the whole chip can be ...
Read more