Looking Back

Welcome back to my blog! Thank you for continuing to read my posts from week to week. Now we have reached the final week of my senior research project. Time flies!

My work at the clinic is coming to an end. As I get ready to leave my cozy little office in the radiology lab, I can't help but reflect on my time at Mayo Clinic. It was a challenging, and at times tedious experience, but it was always fun, and that is what I like most about my project. I had the opportunity to do something that I enjoyed doing, to pursue my interests. Additionally, the food in the staff cafeteria was excellent, so that was a huge bonus.

I have also learned some valuable lessons over the past ten weeks. I hope that those of you who plan to undertake a senior research project in the future can learn from my experiences.

  1. Research can be tedious. At times, progress is painfully slow, but oftentimes this is when your work is most significant and meaningful. You just need to be patient.
  2. Research is highly collaborative. Your work may be only a small part of a much larger project. But this also means that every component is vitally important to the larger whole. 
  3. An open mind is essential. If you encounter a difficult problem and hit a roadblock, back away from it for a while and approach it from a different perspective. You might find something unexpected. Otherwise, it is very easy to lose focus or become obsessed on the tiniest details.

I would also like to give special thanks to my mentors Dr. Zwart, Dr. Silva, and Sikh, as well as my faculty adviser Mr. McClernon, who helped me draft a detailed project proposal and abstract. I am very grateful for all the time and effort they devoted into supporting me. I learned and experienced so much through the course of this project and none of it would have been possible without them.

Currently, my main focus is on my presentation, and although I do not have the final results I hoped to attain, I have more than enough content to share. If you have any further questions about my project or my experience at Mayo Clinic, I'll be happy to answer them below, in the comments!

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 17, 2017 at 3:08 PM

    Hi Richard! I really like the new format of your website! Your project was really interesting and I look forward to your presentation. Thank you for the brief overview of what you learned. I'm sure it will be useful when I am completing a SRP myself. Thank you :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 17, 2017 at 7:22 PM

    Hello Richard, the entire project has intrigued me to the fullest, and I thank you for it. I learned a lot from this blog of cancer, which is what I want to study later down the road. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dylan WangApril 17, 2017 at 8:52 PM

    It's unbelievable I thought this blog was started only 10 weeks ago. Your project was extremely helpful in teaching me more about cancer and it's differences. I hope your presentation goes well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownApril 17, 2017 at 9:35 PM

    Great project Richard, i'm sad it must come to an end.

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownApril 18, 2017 at 8:47 PM

    Hello Richard! Throughout your blogging, you were able to maintain a clear point of view and made it easy to follow! Kudos to you! It was fun following along!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gathering the Data

Image
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...
Read more

Getting Started

Image
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 ...
Read more

Image Analysis And What I Learned

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...
Read more