A Spotlight On Cancer: Characterizing The Steatohepatitic Variant of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Welcome back  to my blog! This time, I will begin by talking about the next phase of my project: image analysis. After obtaining patient MRI scans through the Notion software last week, my goal this week was to begin examining them and identifying regions of interest. It took a while to familiarize myself with ImageJ, and I encountered many problems along the way, but eventually I learned to use it. The scans are taken from the transverse plane, and scrolling through them reveals additional cross-sections in the z-axis, thus providing a 3-Dimensional understanding. Legions in the liver are sometimes difficult to locate, but they appear as a discolored and misshapen mass that appears and then disappears as you scroll through. Each patient contained also several different types of MRI Scans, with names like Apparent Diffusion Coefficient mm2 s Apparent Diffusion Coefficient mm2 s AX DualEcho FSPGR_op phase, AX DualEcho FSPGR_op phase, AX DualEcho FSPGR_in phase, AX DualEcho FSPGR_i...

Welcome back to my blog! The second week of my internship at Mayo Clinic has been very eventful. I have settled into the bioinformatics lab and met many wonderful people. I finally received my mayo clinic staff badge as well, and discovered the staff cafe, which serves really good food. I have been mainly working with Sikh, a student at ASU. He is really nice and has been an invaluable resource for me. Using a software called Notion, we gathered a dataset of patients from the Mayo Clinic database, anonymized them, and fetched their MRI scans. Each scan captures numerous cross-sections of the torso from the transverse plane, and when combined, they form a 3-D representation. In the interest of preserving patient identity, I cannot reveal the actual MRI scans I will be working with until much later in the process, but they look something like this. However, we also faced many unexpected challenges in the process of preparing the data. Some of the studies had corrupted or non-exist...

Welcome back to my blog! I have just completed the first week of my internship at Mayo Clinic. The past few days have been very busy, and I have already learned a lot. I want to share some of my experiences thus far and talk more about my project. The building itself has a great aesthetic appeal, with its wide construction, spacious corridors, and rich sandstone facade, which effortlessly blends into the surrounding mountains and gently fades into the sunset. A peaceful nature trail surrounds the place, decorated with native desert flora. Upon my entrance, I was cordially greeted by volunteers in the lobby, whose job was to welcome visitors and comfort patients. I immediately sensed a positive atmosphere. The interior is a colossal maze of hallways connecting a seemingly countless number of rooms. I almost lost my way trying to traverse to the office of Dr. Zwart, the Radiologist who manages the SRP internship program at Mayo Clinic. After receiving a general orientation in the ...