Week 4

This week has mainly been working on my projects and doing lots of reading.
One of my projects is with Dr. Ana Krieger in Sleep Medicine. From previous work back in Ithaca, a collaborator has designed a "contactless sleep sensing system" called DoppleSleep. It uses radar to sense movements, which can then be deconstructed to show breathing, heartrate, and other sleep events. When patients undergo sleep studies, they are hooked up to many different monitors to track their vital signs, and even electrodes on their head to track nervous system activity. This allows Dr. Krieger's team to identify certain events and patterns while patients sleep. The original idea for this device is to use as a sort of alarm clock, so that it is unobtrusive and would increase compliance. One of the problems is that the signal is strongest at a specific location, so we are working on effective placements in order to get the most data. We have also tried to create a more powerful unit, to hopefully increase the device's ability to collect data.
My work with Dr. Roger Hartl has been helping out with data collection, as I mentioned in a previous blog. But I have also been helping with a more hands-on project that has to do with intervertebral disks. They are studying damage and repair of intervertebral disks in sheep spines. We have removed spines from sheep that had previously undergone surgery weeks prior, where the disks were damaged and then different methods of repair were tested. I helped clean the spines and then cut out segments that contained the disks. We have then been processing these, first in formalin and now in nitric acid. This is a smelly process that takes a long time. They have also scheduled more sheep surgeries in the coming weeks so hopefully I can tag along for that as well, to truly see the start of the process.