Immersion Week 7

 Immersion week 7


This week I watched Dr. Port do a video assisted lobectomy. The tumor was around 8 cm in diameter and was quite visible on the screen. I then watched Dr. Altorki do a hiatus hernia repair. It was extremely interesting because in this case they had to pull the stomach back down into the abdomen. After they determined the physiology and found the stomach, the tied around it and then pulled it down. Usually in a repair you stitch the stomach and wrap it around the esophagus to tighten the esophagus and decrease acid reflux. There was a discussion on whether wrapping it a full 360 degrees versus 270 degrees it better after a new clinical trial came out. It in interesting learn that doctors also reply on the literature search. However, they mainly look at clinical trails. I feel that literature is almost the intersection between all fields, but more clearly between biomedical engineering and medicine. 


I also progressed a lot on my research. I realized that my clusters were extremely biased and batched based on patient. Because of this, I had to re-clean all of my data using harmony integration which made each cluster a well distributed amount of patients. Before cleaning I had 28979 cells, and after cleaning I had 14848. As I am trying to focus on NK cells, the main purpose of cleaning the data was to remove non-NK cells with a focus on CD8 T-cells and some epithelial cells. After this I started looking at what each of the sub clusters are. The patient data we are using has different sample types: normal tissue, non-solid, and solid tumors. Because of this I wanted to look if there was an equal distribution of tissue sample within each cluster. it turned out that some clusters had a larger proportion of normal tissue and others had a larger proportion of tumors. In addition, there were different proportions of solid and non-solid tumors within each cluster. I will continue my research by looking at the markers within each cluster to have a better understanding of what type of NK cell each cluster is and its role in lung cancer.

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