Week 5 - Research Project Underway

This week was fairly similar to others. I shadowed my clinician mentors and was able to learn a bit more about the diagnostic and clinical aspects of neurology, but found myself  yearning to experience other sides of healthcare as well. I thought that perhaps getting some experience shadowing surgeons in the OR might instill a new wave of excitement and allow me to learn things that I have not yet had the chance to see. I reached out to the summer program coordinator to discuss my new desire and she pointed me in the direction of a neurosurgeon who has permitted BME summer students to shadow him in the OR in the past, Dr. Cisse. I reached out to his coordinating team and am hopeful that they will get back to me in the near future so that I may see him perform brain and spine surgery. 

Apart from this, I also officially began to perform my research this week. I learned how to use the program ITK-SNAP and began identifying ischemic lesions in brain scans from patients with small vessel disease. I use this program to identify and outline hyperintensities (bright areas) that appear within the white matter of the brain when the T2 FLAIR technique for MRI is used. I will later be able to impose these lesions onto the QSM image to see if QSM could provide a means of electromagnetically differentiating between lesions in MS and SVD. I was able to speak with Dr. Chiang this week to ask questions regarding the details of how she wanted the hyperintensities subdivided and identified for her SVD patients, which was different than how Dr. Gauthier wants them subdivided and identified in her MS patients, so I will need to keep these differences in identification in mind when I write about what I did for this project later on. As of now, I am still working exclusively with the SVD cases, but am hoping that I will be able to get the MS cases from Dr. Gauthier soon. 

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