Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Not so mandatory orientation

Made the road trip up to Clemson Sunday so I could go to the grad student orientation for the Bioengineering department on Monday. Brought the bike with me so I could ride it around campus and explore a bit.

Biking around Clemson turned out to be a good deal more challenging than I expected. My brain seems to have forgotten that it's been well over 13 years since my body did any serious cycling.

Sunday afternoon I spent a couple of hours getting lost riding around the campus. I had meant to try to find the Rhodes Engineering building where the orientation was supposed to be, but I missed the left turn at Albequerque and got lost in one of the many residence areas. Fun riding around, but the campus turns out to be a lot hillier than I was expecting. Wasn't much good for anything else after all that riding.

Monday morning I got back on the bike despite my protesting sore butt (think a new seat for the bike is in order) and rode around a little bit more. Made a stop at the book store to pick up the texts for my Biomaterials course and also managed to find the Rhodes building. Killed a few more hours and then it was time for the orientation in the brand new bioengineering building.

Turns out the mandatory orientation wasn't so mandatory for those of us in the Clemson/MUSC joint program, although they did seem to appreciate the fact that I made the trip up for it. The trip wasn't entirely useless though. I did get to meet some of the other grad students, some of the faculty and the grad student coordinator. She's the most important person of all to get to know because she's the one that Knows Stuff.

Apparently there's an MUSC orientation that I need to go to next week. I wonder how mandatory that one is.

First lecture

Yesterday was my first Biomaterials class (BioE 801). Just an intro to the class so nothing too big. The list of topics the class covers looks pretty cool though: ceramics, polymers, bioactive materials, biochemical, cell and tissue interactions, a little bit of tissue engineering. 5 other students in the class with me. A passing C is > 70%, but grad students are expected to maintain > B grade average (> 80%).

I have a seminar class Monday afternoons and for the month of September, Monday, Friday and Saturday Research Principles course through MUSC.

I see lots of reading in my future.

Searching for a PhD project

The Clemson Bioengineering department normally wants PhD students to come up with a proposal and do the qualifying exam within 18 months of starting. Since my plan is to do course work and research concurrently, I need to come up with something sooner than that.

I've been rolling around a few possible areas in my head and doing some literature searching to see what's been done.

One obvious area, given our brand-new-state-of-the-art-only-3-in-the-US dual source CT scanner, is dual energy CT. There's been some work doing tissue discrimination and characterization using dual energy CT, but not too much. I could also spend some time studying some of the dosimetry characteristics of doing dual energy CT.

Another area that I would like to explore is phase contrast imaging, although that generally requires a synchrotron source and fairly specialized detectors. Plus I'm not sure that would fit in with the Bioengineering group very well.

There's another idea about CT dosimetry that has been rolling around in my brain for quite a while now, but it's going to take a fair bit of work to flesh out properly and see how feasible it is. If I can take this concept, formalize it, test its validity and make it easy to implement, it could potentially change the way patient radiation doses are determined by the CT scanner.

That would be a lot to do for a PhD, but even if I only accomplished half of it, it would be a big thing.

PhD Year 2

Starting off the first semester of my second year next week.

On the schedule for this year is Structural Biomechanics (BioE 820), Biomedical Basis for Engineered Replacement (BioE 846) and the weekly seminar class (BioE 800).

Going to be a busy semester coming up I think.

Stuff I used to know

Classes have been going on for about 3 weeks now, and it hasn't been too bad so far. BioE 846 (Biomedical Basis for Engineered Replacement) has turned out to be essentially an intro physiology course and BioE 820 (Biomechanics) has just been math review so far (all about tensors).

Basically I've been resurrecting a bunch of stuff I learned back in undergrad and grad school oh so many years ago.

Hopefully things will get more interesting soon.

PhD Year 2.5

Classes start up for me tomorrow with a class in Tissue Engineering and another one on Drug Delivery. Since I don't know much about either one, they should be interesting. Both classes are on Tuesday/Thursday this semester.

Term paper hell

In both my classes this semester (Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery), I'm being asked to write term papers in the form of research proposals (NIH style) in subject areas that I know absolutely nothing about other than what I've learned so far in class.

I have a week and a half to write them.

So. Hosed.

Final exam season

Compared to undergrad where I had to deal with taking 5 exams in a week (3 in one day on a few occasions), PhD finals season isn't so bad.

Today one of my profs sent out an email that informed us only two students wanted to take the final next Thursday, so let's have the final this Thursday instead!

Crap.

It's supposed to be similar to the midterm exam we got, so it shouldn't be too bad. Still, there's a lot of material to review between now and Thursday afternoon.

Next week will conclude PhD Year 2. Time to solidify my thesis project and work on the qualifier so that I can become a PhD student instead of just a PhD candidate.

Eyes bigger than brain?

School starts back up in a couple of weeks.

Signed up for two classes again this semester along with the usual Monday seminar. BioE 850, Clinical Applications in Bioengineering which looked interesting. The other class is a 5 credit Intro to Stats course offered through MUSC's Biostats and Epidemiology department.

Hopefully I haven't bitten off more than I can chew this time with these two courses.

Entering the busy season

The end of the year is usually a pretty busy time of year for me. Normally I'm trying to get the last of the x-ray units tested before heading into the holidays. Add school into the mix and busy turns into crazy.

Four mammography units, 3 CT scanners, 1 RF room, 1 x-ray room and 1 bone density unit left to test. There's also a ton of other miscellaneous work stuff that needs doing in between all that.

On the school side, one project for bioengineering class and tests/homework/project for stats class.

Top it off with trying to get my research work going again.

I'll be glad when the end of the semester rolls around.

Mining stacks of data

All of the interventional radiology (IR) labs at work are capable of spitting out a report that tells about the amount of radiation used in a procedure. Unfortunately, none of them are capable of sending that report to the PACS system with the exception of the newest units.

That means a valuable source of patient radiation dose information usually ends up archived away on optical disk somewhere. Good archiving, lousy search capabilities.

About a year ago we decided to start collecting the dose info so we could find out about the radiation doses patients were getting from IR procedures. The techs were educated on what information the dose reports provided, and we asked them to start printing out the dose summary sheets, which they've been doing for the past year.

Then things started getting in the way and while we were still collecting the dose sheets, no analysis of the data was getting done. Now I've got close to a year's worth of data that I'm finally getting around to entering into a database. It's a lot of typing and data entry.

It will be worth it in the end though I think. All of this dose information is a veritable gold mine and I think it will tell us a lot about what radiation doses in IR procedures are like and how the machines are utilized.

It's going to take a while to get all the numbers in, but I'm chipping away at it a month at a time. 4 months down so far for one room.

Seminar topic: Energy imparted

Next week I have to give a presentation for my seminar class.

I decided to dump the one I've been working on for the last couple of weeks because I don't think I'll be able to throw together anything coherent enough yet using the data I have.

I have a week to finish up my new topic, which is essentially going to be something of a literature review.

Now I have to finish reviewing.

Seminar progress

3 days left to go and I think I'm about half finished with my seminar presentation. Probably won't be as in-depth as it could be, but I think it will be enough. My audience aren't exactly experts in the field.

Qualifier is looming big and large and will involve a lot of writing. I also need to write up a fairly extensive literature review as well. Better start hunting. My Pubmed-fu will be getting a pretty good workout and there will be lots of stuff to read.