Week 6 - Smrithi Karthikeyan

This week was a huge networking and research week. On the networking side of things, I received responses from the Ophthalmology department for shadowing! I am looking forward to seeing how ophthalmologists decide what form of imaging they use for patient diagnoses - this would be helpful for my thesis project for vitreous characterization. In addition, I had the chance to meet with Dr. Min this week. It was interesting to learn more about his 40-year vision for healthcare. He was most excited about expanding Weill Cornell Medicine's precision medicine capabilities; the ability to identify which patients would be at high risk for certain types of cancers from just routine blood work would significantly reduce healthcare costs. One problem with specialized diagnostic blood testing is that there is often a high false positive rate. Therefore, patient risk stratification is important. To overcome this, Weill Cornell Medicine is developing/implementing machine learning algorithms that can identify trends in longitudinal routine blood test data to identify high-risk patients. 

On the research side, I was able to make good progress on my three projects this week! For the mitral annulus calcification project, I met with Angela Deng, a PhD student in the Yi Wang lab, to segment a few QSM scans for calcification. Last week, I had segmented these same patients on CT. My main takeaway from our segmentation session was that it was very difficult to see smaller pieces of calcification - hence why we had to change our method and segment the entire mitral annulus itself. For the aortic segmentation project, I was able to segment 10 ascending scans this week - a record from previous weeks! For the QSM validation project, I edited figures for the manuscript during the later half of this week. For next week, my goal is to complete a literature review of T2-weighted imaging assessment on cardiac outcomes. 


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