Week IV: Research

This week I was able to submit all the materials needed for adding into the IRB. Also, I got to know more people in Dr. Wang's research group and surprisingly found that one of the members was visiting from the same university as my undergraduate. What a small world! She is the only member of the group who majors radiology and has a lot of knowledge about the disease I am going to research in. After attending the group meeting of Dr. Wang's group, we talked a lot about the QSM and its application. From the discussion, I learned that QSM could provide more chronic information compare to enhanced T2 images, which is essentially why QSM is suitable for pathologic study. I would like to continue to keep in touch with her for further discussion as my project moved forward.

Aside from the research, I was finally approved of entering into the MRI control room after the training. I spent most of my time this week in the control room observing the MRI and MRI/PET scan. The technicians in the control room are very willing to answer all my questions about the technology and the imaging process. To my amazement, I found QSM was also able to be scanned through the clinical MRI already! That means we have a lot of data produced daily for the study. For each case, depending on the type of the disease, they have designed protocols with specific sequences they will need to diagnose the disease. This standardized procedure impressed me because back in our imaging lab in Ithaca, we do not seem to have such a step by step imaging protocol for everyone as a reference. If we could learn from them to build a more detailed protocol for each imaging type, I guess we would have higher working efficiency. In the meantime, I realized that gadolinium (Gd) injection is not always in every case, for patients without vascular-related diseases, no Gd-injection is needed. QSM images are normally acquired before the Gd injection, which is nice for comparison before and after enhancement. Another interesting thing I found was that channel multiplexing was adopted in MRI technology for information communication. The spatial multiplexing was implemented through spatial encoding coil to channels.

Next week I will start shadowing Dr. Stieg in the OR and will have a meeting with my mentor. I look forwarding to pushing my research project a bit forward and learn more. In the hospital, I can always learn so much more!!