Week 1 - Hannah Sheffield

The first week of Summer Immersion has been enriching. For reference, my project is with Dr. Gene Kim, and I will be shadowing Dr. Katerina Dodelzon on MWFs. I will organize this blog into two subsections, shadowing and research.

Shadowing

Throughout this experience, I want to focus on shadowing breast imaging (summer reserach) and cardiology (PhD research). 

On Monday, I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Dodelzon to get a general overview of breast mammography. She taught me that women may precede with normal and healthy lives if breast lesions are spotted early (with regular screenings). Additionally, she taught me how to read mammograms, and noted that dark regions represent fat, and bright regions represent fibroglandular tissue (milk ducts and lobules). She mentioned that there are 4 types of breast densities: fatty, scattered, heterogeneous, and extreme. Of those 4, mammography has a difficult time capturing heterogeneous and extreme breast densities. Given its difficulty to distinguish lesions from the dense fibroglandular tissue, MRI is suggested since it has a higher sensitivity than mammography. After my meeting with Dr. Dodelzon, she gave me 4 supplemental readings to understand mammography and breast MRI at a deeper level. Dr. Dodelzon was away for the rest of the week, but referred me to contact Dr. Melissa Reichman to shadow her on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, I met with Dr. Melissa Reichman to shadow an MR biopsy and her MRI screenings. It was my first time shadowing an MR biopsy. I learned about the components of an MRI biopsy system. Overall, it was interesting to see how tissue samples are taken, which is helpful in research surrounding pathology and histology.

I also contacted Dr. Johnathan Weinstaft (Cardiologist) to shadow his procedures, as he would be a potential collaborator for my research back in Ithaca. After emailing him, I was encouraged to call him. I have not heard back from him yet, but hope to hear something soon to organize a future shadowing date.

Research

My summer project consists of working with Dr. Gene Kim on implementing an optimization pipeline for MRI breast image reconstruction. The reason for the study is to develop a pipeline that improves the accuracy of data acquisition. I am tasked to help them optimize their current Patlak model and develop a two compartment model to visually map tracer kinetic parameters post-contrast agent injection.  To ensure that our goals are met, I created a Gantt Chart to organize the tasks that will need to be done to reach our goals.


This week, I have met with Arianna Brenes (Reseracher in Dr. Kim's lab), so she can help walk me through next steps in the project. We are currently attempting to optimize the code to distinguish any time delays observed when the contrast agent is absorbed in the breast lesion. To circumvent this, I was encouraged by Ari to mathematically derive (by hand) the differentials that are being outputted in the Epoch loop for ktrans and vp to validate that the forward pass is working correctly for the Patlak function throughout each iteration in the loop. I will meet with Ari and Gene next week to show my mathematical derivations, and progress in optimizing the code.

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