Week 2 - Austin Bunce

  Clinical:

    This week I did not shadow Dr. Schwartz for any surgeries.  Since watching the end-nasal and cranial tumor removals last week I didn't feel the need to watch any more of the same surgeries.  After watching surgeries though I was really interested in seeing the patients to see how they were doing after surgery.  Luckily for me I did get to follow Dr. Schwartz around in clinic on Tuesday.  I got to see his outpatient meetings, as well as his post surgery inpatients.  It was very good to see the non-surgery side of his job.  Most of the visits went well and the patients were happy, but a few outpatient visits were about patients that had tumors and would need surgery soon.  These visits involved some tough decisions and it was really motivating for me to see these patients.  While surgery is a one of the best options right now, seeing the fear some of the patients had and the stress these decisions were causing them makes me want to come up with a better solution than surgery.  Also on these clinical visits I learned about a few upcoming epilepsy related surgeries that Dr. Schwartz will be performing that I really want to see.  Next week he will be doing an intracranial tumor removal from the motor cortex while the patient is awake, and later on he will be implanting a vagal nerve stimulator.  I am really interested in epilepsy and am very excited to see these procedures.  

Research:

    This week in research was mostly more of the same.  I worked on my Matlab project where I am coding an APP to run their wide field imaging system.  I was hoping to finish it up this week but I ran into some snags as could be expected along the way.  The figure object I was using in Matlab was outdated and was not able to stream video from the camera at a high enough frame rate, so I had to update many of the Matlab packages and licenses in order to get that working.  This update caused some other things to change that I had to go back and work on.  Luckily I have most of the important functions working on the APP.  All I have to finish cleaning up next week is the sampling function where the data is written to the disk.  I am also hoping to start my epilepsy EEG analysis project, though James says that he is not ready to get me the data yet.  If I can get started on that next week that would be good so that I have plenty of time to work on classification metrics and see what one works the best.  

NYC:

    My second week in NYC was almost as eventful as the first.  I went with a group to the museum of natural history on the weekend.  It was soooooo HUGE!!  We spent over 4 hours there and it still felt like we didn't see everything and had to browse past things quickly.  I was also able to check out chinatown with a group on Saturday.  The food was really good and much cheaper than the other parts of the city I'd been to.  During the week I checked out a handful of great restaurants, from mexican to award winning burgers.  Unfortunately it rained a bit this week, and the middle of the week was very hot.  The feel-like temperatures were over 100 and that made it hard to want to go out.  We still had fun hanging out at the dorm though.  A handful of us played Smash and ping pong down in the student lounge a couple times.  






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