Week 3 - Caleb Jones

Week three is coming to and end and so are my energy reserves, but this week was pretty darn exciting. In addition to continuing working on the project given to me by Dr. Gillen, I was able to meet up with other summer immersion students and observe some neurosurgeries. I had to the opportunity to observe a transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF), as well as a brain tumor procedure wherein electrical mapping was necessary to tease out which areas of the brain were involved in sensorimotor control of the patients right arm, which was presenting with sporadic seizures localized to the arm. 

There have been a lot of difficulties having access to a desktop computer to continue working on my project, but I was able to recreate a RGB image filter in Matlab that was originally written in python, with the intention of validating some analysis that was previously performed by someone in the lab. Although the main excitement of this week was shadowing surgeons, I am hoping to get more work done next week on developing a new method of quantifying MBP in the histology data.

Next week, I am excited about the opportunity for MRI training. I have heard tale that we get to participate in a study as healthy controls and get to see our own images. Once I have seen my own brain I will have achieved the peak of my scientific career, and then the rest of my PhD is more or less irrelevant.