Week 1

I first met with my clinical mentor Dr. Susan Gauthier on Tuesday morning this week. She was having a routine meeting with Dr. Nguyen and other graduate students at Cornell MRI research lab. They were discussing about project progress regarding changing detection of MS lesion variation. I joined their meeting and tried to receive and understand information as much as I could. As I knew, One of the biggest challenges of their MS lesion detection workflow was the grey matter variation and growth along longitudinal study of the subjects, which would counteract the effective detection of lesion changes. Since I did one MS lesion segmentation project in my machine learning class last semester, it was kind of easy for me to get involved in the discussion and expressed opinion quickly. I brought some innovative machine learning/deep learning ideas into the group meeting, and talked about the feasibility of the ideas in this project. Dr. Gauthier encouraged me to work on it and besides, take more valuable medical training and experience during this immersion summer.

I visited the radiology reading room the next day after the meeting. I focus on improving image quality meanwhile shorten scanning time of MRI to help doctors boost their working efficiency and make better and faster clinical decision, so this reading room journey should be essential for my research. Dr. Ajay Gupta showed us how they utilized different contrasts and sequences of MR images to combine and compare information, and made intermediate or final conclusions about what happened in this patient at certain biological tissue or system. what surprised me most was that even though there existed apparent aliasing artifacts in brain MR images, radiologists were still comfortable about that and could focus on the part of brain they were interested in and automatically ignored the artifacts. For my PhD thesis research, suppressing artifact in MRI reconstruction problem is a vital part of the whole research picture, and now I've learned that doctors have been trained to tolerate the artifacts in some sense.  From now on, once a get a new result and need to evaluate the quality of the result, I definitely need the help from doctors, since they are the experts who need MR images desperately and who have the first right to evaluate my work from the clinical point of view, since sometimes things are different from what I thought before, as I experienced in the reading room this week.

Life in New York City is always so amazing. I've explored several wonderful restaurants in upper town Manhattan with my friends, these experiences also made my summer immersion time more memorable!