Week 6

This week has been focused on finalizing the data for the paper that I have been working on. A lot of my time has been spent working on categorizing the patients into groups in terms of their exercise protocol and the etiology of their mitral regurgitation. This has been in order to make sure that we are making the most compelling argument about the cohort that we can. There are also several different measurements for both the echocardiogram and the nuclear stress test that could be used as independent variables and I spent time this week comparing our work to previous papers and making sure that the use of these variables is consistent with what has been accepted in the past.

I also continued to read MRIs and echocardiogram with the fellows. There have been some unusual cases and it is always interesting to see the kind of changes that the heart can undergo and still function. I have looked at some very extreme cases of dilation and hypertrophy to confirm that the values that I am using in my statistical model are accurate. There have been zero cases where outliers were actually false data. All of the points that seemed suspicious were just very extreme cases of volume or low ejection fraction. This has been a lesson in the robustness of the human system and has really been one of the main takeaways from my Immersion so far.