Week 3

This week is kind of busy for me. People in the lab have come back from ISMRM conference last weekend, and they have brought a bunch of new ideas in terms of MRI research field. So for this week, I spend half of the time doing my PhD research based on their new ideas, and the other half of the time practicing immersion.

On Monday, Aaron led me to the operating room to watch Dr. Schwartz's surgery. They were extracting pituitary tumor out of the patient's brain through her nose. This was my first time to enter into the operating room and watch surgery at such close location. Before Dr. Schwartz arrived, assistants helped Dr. Schwartz to clean the nose and dig a small hole though which tumor can be caught out of the brain. This process took around one and a half hour until Dr. Schwartz came and started to work on the critical part of this surgery. This main procedure is essential to complete the whole surgery successfully, and Dr. Schwartz was quite skilled to finish this part. They caught a small pituitary tumor from patient's brain and after that, post cleaning and processing steps were done by assistants again.

After watching the clinical surgery, I joined Dr. Gauthier's daily appointments with her patients and watched their conversations on Wednesday. Dr. Gauthier invited me to watch and learn, which was quite a meaningful experience for me to get immersed in doctor's daily work. The first patient was a young pregnant woman with potential multiple sclerosis lesions. This was her second appointment with doctor and back to her first one in February, she was already pregnant. She was in good condition after inquiry and physical exam, so hopefully she could get cured soon. The second patient, a 74-year-old woman, was not that lucky. Because of her age, she had several symptoms such as high  blood pressure, dizzying and blurred vision. Dr. Gauthier was so patient to communicate with her and ask about the medication she had been taken for the last half year.

As for my research, people in the lab shared their experience on Friday's lab meeting. The hottest topic was 'machine learning in MRI'. A lot of posts and talks have come out during ISMRM which caught our attention successively. Dr. Wang wanted me to do some research on combining machine learning with QSM inversion problem. I'm thinking of this direction this days and some of the preliminary results have come out. I'll show some of the results in future's lab meeting. Let's catch up with this trend.