Week 5: Peter

 This week has been pretty interesting. I started with presenting my preliminary image analysis results at lab meeting. Dr. Roth agreed that the results for the nuclear stain looked good but the cytoplasmic stains need some work. Unfortunately, the pathologist I need to meet with has been out this whole week but hopefully should be back next week. With her input, not only should I be able to more effectively tune the algorithm, I will also be able to identify which cores I can disregard. To my eyes, some of them are overstained and when I try and make an algorithm that can process those samples, it absolutely butchers the normal samples. Outside of this project, I've been helping in the tumor measurements for the mice. I also helped prepare samples for a flow experiment. We are looking at IFN-gamma, IL6, IL10, IL4 production in different B-cell lymphoma lines to see if there is an association with the latency program. I'll learn how to process the data next week. I've also been shadowing one of the lab technicians. I learned how to separate blood with Ficoll, as the lab receives several vials of blood every day as part of a clinical trial. I'll try and tag along for some mouse genotyping in the coming week. In the clinic, a patient that we saw in June was back in. She had gotten the cardiac CT and everything looked good so she will be good to proceed with surgery next week. I also got connected with some of Dr. Chandwani's PA's which will help me with getting into a couple more surgeries this summer.