Week 7: More Updates!
Shriya S -
Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog. So far, things have been going fairly smoothly, but of course there have been a few challenges here and there, and as the presentation date approaches, the workload is condensing as well.
Final Product
Throughout the blog posts, I realized I have not mentioned my final product! I did discuss my research paper a little, but personally, because that is an AP Research requirement and leaves little room for creativity, I want to do make something more fun and accessible accessible. So, in addition to that, I will be coding a game!
A few weeks ago, I talked about my scoring guide for immunohistochemistry (IHC) images, which is my method of quantifying their image quality. Well, why not, I thought, have other people also score these images? It would help them understand IHC images, while giving them the opportunity to analyze interesting cells in brain tissue samples! So, essentially this game will be making users score different IHC images and see if there scores match the researcher’s (i.e., my) scores (or rather, if their scores are within a 50% range of my score as matching it exactly is a little difficult).
Right now it does sound like a lot, and in fact one of my biggest challenges was making the game accessible enough. But, truncating the information enough so that users understand what constitutes a “good” stain was, in the end, all I had to do. This sounds so simple, yet it can be difficult to grasp initially. Since I haven’t coded in some time, that itself was a challenge as well, especially because I’m using JAVA, CSS, and HTML, instead of the familiar python. But, online resources have helped me understand its basics. This project definitely has my creative capillaries circulating, but it can definitely be frustrating at times to debug the code, especially when the bug was a simple syntax error.
Anyways, that is extremely exciting. Because, there is an inevitable subjective element to my scoring guide, I am very curious to see how others will score the images. I guess now my project checks all the boxes: biology, chemistry, and computer science!
Lab work: IHC
We essentially finished analyzing all of our antigens last week! (Technically, we have to redo a few tissue samples this week because we made a small error in the concentration ranges, and one of the slides is giving us issues when we try to scan it). But…we are 98% done with our data collection. How fun😃
Paper?
The paper is coming along well! I am using AMA (American Medical Association) format because papers in this field of research use that format. It is tricky sometimes because the formatting rules are fairly lenient, variable, and unstandardized. But, I have been using other papers as a reference.
I have expressed my distaste for research writing before, so that is probably the hardest part about this. I just have my last few sections to finish—discussion, limitations, implications and future directions. Right now, I have notes for what I want to write…I just have to turn it into cohesive and smooth writing. I think what helps me is prioritizing clarity and conciseness over smoothness and word choice. Later, my revisions could help refine those parts.
Images?
Last week, we were finally able to capture the images! Because it was taking a long time to download all of them, we only got through half. We’ll do the other half this week. But…I hope you enjoy the images below! I have added captions so you know what you are looking at.
(I wanted to add a few macroscopic pictures too, so you could see the whole scale view of the brain “slices” on the slide. But, that unfortunately exceeded the file size limit for this website.)
But, that’s it for my updates. I have been learning so much from this experience and am so incredibly grateful to BASIS Phoenix and the UA college of medicine for this opportunity, and, of course, everyone involved with it! Please let me know if you have any questions about the images, IHC, the game, TBI, or just some fun science I talked about in my previous posts!
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