Ben Weppner / Dr. Hooman Kamel - Week 4

 Week 4: 06/26/23-06/30/23

This week, I spent more time in the neuro ICU with Dr. Alex Merkler. I was able to see the progress some patients had made from seeing them last week which I found encouraging. It was interesting to see the variety of cases in the neuro ICU, the majority of which were stroke and hemorrhage. I had the opportunity to learn more about particular medical conditions, including how subarachnoid hemorrhage leads to a much higher risk of cerebral vasospasm, especially within about two weeks of the hemorrhage. I also learned about idiopathic intracranial hypertension which can lead to a loss of vision due to pressure on the optic nerve.

Dr. Zan was out of town this week, but I hope to join her again in the neuroradiology reading room next week.

For research, I continued work on analyzing a stroke data set with a goal of performing perfusion-diffusion mismatch. I have been going through each case to check which patients have both a perfusion weighted image (PWI) and a diffusion weighted image (DWI) because both are needed for perfusion-diffusion mismatch. Also, I have been examining the quality of the co-registration to ensure that the PWI and DWI scans appear to be correctly co-registered to each other, as well as to check that the images didn't have any features cut out when co-registering to the T1 scan that was used as the reference.

On Friday 6/30, I attended Dr. Martin Prince's presentation on medical imaging. As someone who does research on MRI, this was very interesting to me. He showed medical imaging images without any background, and walked through diagnosing the problem with one student at a time. He gave each student their own unique case to figure out, then everyone worked as a team to figure out the last few cases. It was great to test myself on what I've learned from looking at MRI scans, even through I normally only work with brain scans. Also, I got to test my ability to identify medical abnormalities from CT and X-ray imaging which was enjoyable.





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