Week 4: MJ

This week, I attended the immersion weekly meetings, where Dr. Mert Sabuncu discussed his research on using AI in radiology. He discussed various algorithms and their progress as well as hopes that these models can be used to diagnose patient cases. I also attended rheumatology journal club, where a paper published the statistics of in/out of network claims and denials. They found that there were over 71 million denials and the most common reason for these denials was "other". The other paper discussed at this journal club studied features of myositis and myasthenia gravis in patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. In the clinic, I shadowed Dr. Fernandez as he saw a wide variety of patients with myositis, lupus, and various connective tissue disorders. One particularly interesting patient was a young patient with a severe case of necrotizing myositis. Dr. Fernandez recommended that he consider CAR-T therapy, which has shown promise in cancers and is not being considered in other immune-related diseases. In the lab, I continued to work on analyzing bulk RNA-sequencing data from cells with specific gene knock-outs that may contribute to disease phenotypes in inclusion body myositis.