Week 5 - Arnold Chen

 

        At this week’s infectious disease conference, a case about lump on then neck was discussed. It was not very obvious what the lump was; the presenter talked about the possibility that it could be due to an infection, inflammation, neoplasm. In terms of the lump, it could be a non-infectious granulomatous lymphadenitis or an infectious granulomatous lymphadenitis. If it is an infectious granulomatous lymphadenitis, it can be suppurative (with pus formation) or non-suppurative (without pus formation). While the doctors were not sure which case it was, in addition to more scientific evidence such as medical images, they also considered other evidence such as work and life history. It was educational to see the doctors discussing the different disease possibilities and what additional tests would need to be done to acquire more evidence for making a diagnosis.

            I also joined the rounds in the microbiology lab with Dr. Westblade. In the microbiology lab, technicians culture samples biopsied from patients to observe microbial growth and test for the presence of bacteria. Dr. Westblade then goes around talking to technicians about new developments or observations. One of the plates contained aspergillus, and in a lot of the cases, it required looking under the microscope for the presence of potentially more than one type of microorganism. I also learned that they use MacConkey agar for selecting for non-fastidious gram-negative organisms. For my PhD research, I used different kinds of agar to grow environmental microbes, so it was interesting to see what types of culture medium are used in the microbiology lab for patient diagnosis. In addition, there were also a device that automatically streak the colonies and label the plates, a microscope that had six eyepieces for a maximum of six people to look into at the same time, and a machine used for COVID testing. I have not seen these devices before, and it was pretty cool to see them.

            I made additional modifications to the mobile app I was working on. One piece of feedback from the clinic was to allow the user to take multiple photos rather than just one. Before taking any photo, the user would enter information relevant to all the photos that will be taken. In addition, after each photo, the user would enter information relevant to that specific photo. Therefore, I made the adjustments by storing photos and filenames into an array, passing information smoothly when navigating in both the forward and backwards directions, and adjusting for user-friendliness (displaying what the user inputted, color-coding, appropriately spaced components, etc.) by thinking about potential failed use cases. From my visit to the clinic, one emphasis from the doctor was user-friendliness. Therefore, it was a factor that I constantly take into consideration when designing this mobile app.

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