Week 1 - Jawad

The first week has been a mixture of anxiety, and excitement. Monday began with the introductory meeting, obtaining the IDs, and some preliminaries.

On Tuesday I met my mentor for the immersion term, Dr. Gauthier in the morning. She is a neurologist, primarily investigating Multiple Sclerosis (MS). She briefed me a bit on the disease and the kind of work she does. Then I attended the meeting of her research group, where I was privy to a lively discussion on a novel algorithm for T2-relaxometry that will circumvent the problem of extracting fruitful information from low SNR images. Here I also chatted with the group members about potential projects, and sort of identified a broad theme for a project.

Wednesday was spent digging up a few papers that related to T2-Relaxometry, Multiple Sclerosis, and MRI scans images and how to read and interpret them. I learnt a great deal about the challenges faced ranging from the time it takes for the image of full brain and or spinal cord to be taken, to processing and extracting information from them.

Thursday began with the ethics training session for all the immersion participants. It was fun and engaging. After that most of the day was spent in the lab getting acquainted with some of the data processing techniques Dr. Gauthier's group uses. It was not that difficult to grasp for me, given my background in computing. Mostly exploring and coding a few Bayesian algorithms in Matlab. The day concluded with a briefing on the purpose and support structures available during the immersion term.

On Friday I observed Dr. Gauthier in her clinic, attending to patients. It was such a great experience to work with the patients of multiple sclerosis (MC), learning about the implications of the disease on the day-to-day workings and lives of the people, and how they cope with it. I came to know about the JC virus, and how some medications for MC can 'activate' the virus in people having them which could potentially then be fatal! I appreciated the prevalence, and progress of MC and it's dependance on several factors like lifestyle, age and gender. As every patient was undergoing a physical examination, I saw it so many times that I think I can do the procedure on patients myself the next time!

All in all, it was a rather hectic yet exciting week. I look forward to observing some surgeries next week.