Cindy Tung / Dr. Susan Gauthier - Week 7

 This week, I mainly focused on my research project and spent less time in the hospital with clinicians. During small animal scanning in the MRI machine, there are many wires hooking up to the mouse, one of which tracks ECG and respiration. Unfortunately, one of the mice stopped breathing and died shortly after being in the scanner. The scans are repeated weekly in order to track the tumor growth, and will eventually need to be resected when it becomes too large. 

This week, I also gave a journal club presentation in Professor Zuo's lab on two papers surrounding the topic of QSM. It was my first time presenting papers that I've read, and it was a great learning experience to test how much of the reading I understood. Because I don't have a background in physics, it was a bit difficult to understand the mathematical concepts used to produce different MRI images. I learned that there are two steps to producing a quantitative susceptibility map: 1) background field removal and 2) dipole inversion. In both steps, there are various methods that have been produced to obtain a high-resolution image in a shorter amount of time/with less data. Linear algebra is heavily used in map conversions and is a topic I plan to review as I continue my research. 

Lastly, I am making progress on a motion phantom by integrating a pivot socket system to simulate liver and pancreas organ movement within a larger body compartment. We hope that we will be able to implement realistic motion of the organs to serve as an imaging standard in developing motion-sensing algorithms. Some of the topics we plan to discuss are the viscosity of liquids we plan to use inside/outside of the organs and where we want the pivot movement to originate from (bottom of body compartment vs. inside organ).