Monday, July 23, 2012

Anne - Week 6

This week was mainly focused on research. I have been making MRI contrast perfusion graphs for various liver lesions: hemangioma, metastasis, focal nodular hyperplasia, cirrhosis, heptacellular carcinoma, and arteriovenous shunt. Together with my clinical mentor and the MRI fellow, I am working on developing model equations to characterize the perfusion. Right now, clinicians rely on experience and a visual image to characterize various lesion types, and it would be great to have a more objective way to do this. We are most interested in the time to peak (TTP) for each lesion, in addition to when the peak begins and ends.

The biggest obstacle is that the regions of interest (ROIs) are static in the frame over time, and the patients often breathe during the minute time period. This causes the ROI to move off the lesion. As an alternative, we could move the ROI to follow the lesion as the person moves, but this would be frame-by-frame (there are 288 frames for the one minute). We might have to just collect fewer than 288 frames, and since there is a lot of noise in the data anyway, we would probably still be able to get the general trend.

Besides research, I spent a morning rounding in the PICU, and my experience there was similar to the NICU. I attempted to round in the ER as well, but it was very busy and I ended up seeing only two patients. I cannot believe this immersion is almost over!

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