Week 2 - Robert Hawkins

 Clinical - This week I was able to observe another cognitive assessment of a subject that was going to be inducted into an imaging study. Like last week, this subject was a 'healthy control' and so the assessment wasn't as interesting as it would be if the person had Alzheimer's disease or dementia. The tests given to this subject were slightly different than the ones I had seen last week, and were overall much more difficult. For example, one task was to listen to a long paragraph of speech and then to recite as much as possible. Another task was to be shown pairings of abstract shapes alongside numbers and then to recount what number corresponded with each shape when just the shape was shown by itself. I hope to eventually see a cognitive assessment performed on someone who is cognitively impaired. Also this week I was able to see a PET/CT scan performed on a healthy subject. The purpose of the study is to track the dynamics of the tracer in the brain in order to get a measurement of the brain's rate of clearance. I was able to learn about the radiotracer that was being used for the PET scan and the general principles of how the PET scan works. 

Research - Similar to last week, I have continued to use MATLAB and R to explore a national Alzheimer's imaging/biomarker dataset. This has been going well, but it has been difficult to find correlations that are both significant and have not already been reported.

Life - This week definitely went by faster than last week! A group of us took the ferry to Brooklyn and went to 'Smorgasburg', which is a weekly food fair that has a lot of different, all really great, types of food. Brooklyn also has a great view of the Manhattan skyline, especially after the sun has set. We also went to the Natural History Museum, a Yankees game in Yankee Stadium, and tried a lot of different food places!

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