Ben Weppner / Dr. Hooman Kamel - Week 7

Week 7: 07/17/23-07/21/23

This week, I joined for rounds in the neuro ICU at WCMC once again, this week with my clinical mentor, Dr. Kamel, who was the attending physician. I learned about the importance of proper monitoring of glucose levels in ICU patients, specifically regarding hypoglycemia because it can lead to neuronal death, making the patients' conditions worse. Also, I learned that increased intracranial pressure can lead to swelling of the optic disc in the eye which is called papilledema. Additionally, I was able to see a patient get extubated which I found interesting.

On Tuesday, the weekly summer immersion meeting was dedicated to short presentations talking about summer immersion experiences. It was interesting to learn more about what type of research other students were participating in, as well as the various clinical experiences they got to be a part of while here. I will be presenting my experiences at the weekly meeting next week.

For research, I compared the results of my gamma variate function fits to other models, such as a biexponential function, by using the mean squared error and the L1 error following fitting across hundreds of individual curves. Also, I discovered an improved way of preprocessing my PWI data that led to better results than I was getting previously. This allowed me to gain insight into how the model works and how it can be affected by the input data, which will be useful for further developments. On Friday, I presented my research updates at my lab's weekly lab meeting.

After my lab meeting, I attended Dr. Prince's talk on entrepreneurship. Dr. Prince has a very impressive history of discovery and product development, so hearing how he did it was very interesting. He gave insightful advice based on how he accomplished what he did, such as to be open to new ideas and how to go from an idea to a patent. He mentioned how seeing others trying to steal your ideas is a good indicator that you have a good idea that's worth developing.

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