Week 8 - Smrithi Karthikeyan

 This week is the final week of the clinical immersion experience! It still surprises me how fast these past two months have gone. From surgeries to long days in the lab, this experience has taught me the "dance" of the operating theater, how physicians interpret imaging (and piece together multiple modalities), and given me ideas for how I can maybe address some clinical pain points in my future research. 

This week, I was focused on wrapping up my three research projects. For the calcification project, I completed selecting our control group cases and segmented QSM scans with Dr. Pablo Villar-Calle and Angela Deng. After doing a brief analysis of our newly segmented cases, we have found that our QSM moments of the mitral annular region strongly correlate to the gold standard volumetric calcification score in CT (r=0.9)! This was very exciting to see, and we plan on having future meetings to look at other trends we find in the data. 

For my QSM oxygenation literature review (under the guidance of Dr. Weinsaft), I was able to identify 14 papers that discuss using either QSM or T2 Mapping to measure mixed venous oxygenation (SvO2) in both the left and right ventricles. Looking at the field right now, the more common approach to measuring SvO2 non-invasively is T2 mapping. However, this approach does not seem to have as high a correlation to the gold-standard SvO2 measurement from the invasive right heart catheterization procedure. Dr. Weinsaft's group at Weill Cornell are the major players in using QSM for non-invasive measurements of oxygenation, and I look forward to seeing where this technology goes in the future!

Finally, I have finished segmenting approximately 40 ascending/descending aorta scans to help train a U-Net model. The final results are unknown, but I hope my segmentations help improve the model's accuracy! This project made me realize the need for vast amounts of datasets for incorporating AI in medical image segmentation; deep learning models do not work with small datasets. I wonder if the current lack of vast datasets would increase the popularity of synthetic datasets or physics-based virtual modeling of tissue. 

Overall, immersion was a wonderful experience in which I got to learn a lot from physicians, nurses, industry engineers, and imaging/lab technicians. It takes a mighty village to keep hospital operations running smoothly, and this experience has made me more excited to contribute and innovate in the healthcare landscape. 

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