Sean Wo: Working With a Research Patient BACK

Published by AFAR

I arrived at the lab early on this particular morning, and I was already sweating from the muggy Pittsburgh summer. Although my involvement in the MR HYPER (mister hyper) project mostly involves behind-the-scenes data analysis, I had the opportunity this morning to see for myself how the data is collected.

Today's subject, a middle-aged female, came bustling through the door about 20 minutes late. Being in a hurry didn't help either. MR HYPER compares brain aging in prehypertensive people with normotensives. Measuring blood pressure accurately is crux of the project, meaning that she would have to sit calmly for several minutes before the research assistant could take her BP. Unfortunately, this also meant that the subject, whom I'll call Ms. H, was going to miss her MRI appointment.

After some logistical wrangling, Ms. H finally made it to the MR magnet, but it was not all smooth sailing from there. She suddenly found herself claustrophobic upon entering the scanner bore and had to be taken out. With the help of her significant other, she coaxed herself back into the scanner, but had to be taken out again when the MR images showed that there was something metallic in her hair. Ultimately,

Ms. H completed the scans, which lasted a whole hour. The SO was a real trooper; he sat in the corner of the uncomfortably cold scanner room giving moral support while the rest of us cleared out to the more hospitable control room. Ms. H had a hard time staying still. She squirmed and kicked often, making some of the MR data quite poor. However, as much as I wanted her to keep still, I could understand the difficulty of doing so. Some years earlier, I was a subject in an fMRI study and I remember how unnatural it was to have my head strapped onto a bed lying in the middle of an oversized, noisy magnet.

In the afternoon, I went with my PI to see a statistician who would give us some instruction on doing diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). I had been reading up on various MRI modalities, trying to make sense of the math involved. The statistician explained things in clear terms, but most of the theoretical stuff is over my head. I found myself wishing that I had paid more attention in college during linear algebra class.

I spent the rest of the day trying to set up a way to calculate grey matter thicknesses on the brains of MR HYPER subjects. As it turns out, reconstructing brain surfaces from MRIs takes a lot more computing power than the typical medical student laptop. I found a distributed computing project on campus that I think will help me, but progress for the day was slow because of my inexperience with Linux. I think I'm pretty handy with computers, but I'm no programmer like many of my fellow med students, an illustrious crowd they are. At the end of the day, I reflected on how my aging research calls on all the skills and knowledge that I've accumulated over the years and then some. Coming into the summer, I knew that the studying I put into my med school neuroscience course would pay off, but I never suspected that the times I slept through math in undergrad would come back to haunt me. Although challenging, using neuroimaging to study aging is truly a worthwhile and interesting pursuit.

Sean Wo
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

 

"Diary of an MSTAR Student" follows scholars in the 2011 Medical Student Training in Aging Research (MSTAR) Program, highlighting their summer experiences. As they continue their path of research, training and clinical practice, read their daily thoughts at www.afar.org/mstarblog. New diary entries are posted every day, so check back soon.