3/5/25- Complications and New Project
Marina B -
Hi everyone!
I hope you’re all doing well! This week has been another great step forward in my research project!
I’ve had a meeting almost every day of this week and have two upcoming ones on Thursday and Friday. I’ve met with my research mentor, an undergraduate student at ASU, a medical student, and a postgraduate student– all of whom are working on this paper with me! It has really shown me the importance of collaboration and teamwork in the scientific world!
However, this week was also somewhat stressful because of some issues we ran into. As I mentioned in another post, we use the PIRADS scale to identify how high risk the prostate cancer is with a PIRADS score of 1 being very low risk (these patients typically won’t even be treated) and a PIRADS score of 5 being extremely high risk. Since PIRADS 1 & 2 are low-risk cancers, they are not considered clinically significant, so we excluded them when looking at certain data. For example, when biopsying patients, patients with PIRADS 1 & 2 scores likely won’t even get biopsies, so it’s important to take that into account. We write out all the exclusions through a consort diagram (described in a previous post), and I had excluded those patients since their cancer is not considered clinically significant prostate cancer (csPca). However, since we were still using their data in other tables, the exclusion in the consort diagram overly complicated things. The medical student who has been working on this paper for months did not exclude them in her version, and after this morning’s meeting, we made the catch and decided not to exclude them going forward to make it more logical.
Also, I will be starting on another project this week regarding the yield of PIRADS scores based on the transition zone and peripheral zone (two different zones of the prostate).
As you see in the figure, there are different ways to get to different PIRADS scoring, based on whether or not there is high or low levels of diffusion and profusion (tumors will have low levels of diffusion because water cannot easily move through them and high levels of profusion because they require a lot of blood). I will give out more details about this new project next week once I get started!
Thanks for reading,
Marina Braggio
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