Hunting for more Lesions!

I got back to work this week. My mentors were still away for Spring Break, so I mostly worked alone. Continuing the work of week 4, I spent my time reviewing patient MRI scans. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, my task for each MRI scan is to search for legions indicative of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC). I then mark these lesions as a region of interest and compare it to a separate region of interest located in normal liver tissue, which acts as a control. 

I got the first few patients done pretty quickly. It was very easy to identify tumors. But I soon discovered that these patients were the exception, not the standard. For most of the patient scans, the visual difference between lesions and surrounding, healthy tissue was very subtle. Gradually, I trained my eyes to notice these slight differences in color and shading, but the entire process was based on trial and failure nevertheless. Additionally, some of the scans were extremely low-quality and pixelated, making lesion detection even more difficult. Other scans were corrupted and had missing data, so I was forced to work around that as well.

Another difficulty lay in the variety of naming and operational conventions used to produce the patient MRI scans. My goal is to examine several types of scans: Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC), Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI), Axial In-phase, Axial Out-phase, Axial Pre/Post-phase LAVA, and Axial T2. Each one reveals a different perspective. However, the exact names differ with each radiologist, so it took some effort to match everything together. Also, some patients lack certain scans, either because the radiologist in charge of the exam did not believe them to be necessary, or were limited by their equipment. 

However, despite these setbacks, I'm making steady progress. I expect to finish lesion identification for all patients by the end of next week, which will allow me to move on to the next phase of my project. More will be revealed in next week's blog post!