Happiness in Medicine

Again and again, quality of life (QOL) in different forms is shown to correlate to better recovery from cancer (and other health issues). I find these papers depressing - we'll never get health insurance to pay for trips to Disneyworld, better food, or social programs for people with cancer. A recent paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology shows a correlation of this type, but claims no causation:

Title: Decrease in Depression Symptoms Is Associated With Longer Survival in Patients With Metastatic Breast Cancer: A Secondary Analysis

Authors: Janine Giese-Davis, Kate Collie, Kate M.S. Rancourt, Eric Neri, Helena C. Kraemer, and David Spiegel

Pictures from Snowpocalypse

The Saga of Snowpocalypse 2010

One of the advantages of being on vacation is getting away from the internet and what is "going on in the world". Luckily, family members read the paper. So while Tom and I were peacefully enjoying our holiday break in Ohio, we were informed that a blizzard was going to hit the East Coast. Just about the time we were to fly to Newark to depart for Israel.

The Interdisciplinary Side of APS

I like going to conferences. I like having results and being an expert on something enough to stand up in front of my peers and tell them about it. I think it is a big, important part of science.

But now the question is, what conference would I go to? As a particle physicist the answer was either APS April Meeting (their big particle/astro/cosmo meeting) or a division meeting - the division of nuclear physics or particles and fields. These conferences are fairly big and have lots of students. There is often support from APS for students to go. Sure, there were other conferences (usually in more exciting places) that had a specific topic, like a specific type of detector technology or type of particle interaction. But those conferences had fewer students and usually only one (or a few) people from a single experiment. The APS meetings had plenty of overlap - a session of double beta decay people each giving the same overview of double beta decay, for instance.

Now March meeting is slightly more appropriate - the HUGE condensed matter meeting has biophysics as well. Am I a biophysicist? Well, sortof. I'd like to present the Cerenkov Light Imaging simulations I am working on. It involves simulations of particle interactions (physics) and it is used for biological measurements. So it sounds like biophysics to me.

Transparent Mice

I'm currently taking a course on "Multi-Modality Molecular Imaging in Living Subjects" which covers MRI, CT, Optical, and PET imaging. The first topic was optical (fluorescence and bioluminescence) imaging which, in a way, is easiest. Certain molecules give off light, either when exposed to specific other molecules or when excited with light. You then look for this light to see where the molecule of interest is. The problem is, tissue isn't transparent to light. Red light gets through the easiest, which can be seen by shining a flashlight through your hand.

Sequelae: Word of the day

The common advice for encountering unknown words is to "look at the context"... well, that doesn't really work in academia, let alone biomedicine:

Among any groups of patients given the same radiation treatment, some show more sever normal-tissue reactions than others, and a small proportion suffer unacceptable late sequelae.

What is sequelae? Well it is apparently bad and can potentially result from radiation treatment. I decided to try my handy new Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, Twenty-fifth Edition and looked up the word:

sequelae plural of sequela

Had I taken Latin I suppose I could have seen that coming.

sequela any lesion or affection following or caused by an attack of disease.

Only slightly more helpful, I suppose - "any affection"? I went to wikipedia to understand better and got

a pathological condition resulting from a disease, injury, or other trauma.

Ah! Much better! Just in case it isn't clear yet, let me translate. A sequelae is something (usually known as a symptom or bad shit) that occurs because of something medical happening. If I was writing the textbook, (maybe I can volunteer for the 7th edition) the original paragraph could have read:

Among any groups of patients given the same radiation treatment, some show more sever normal-tissue reactions than others, and a small proportion suffer from some bad shit so they refuse treatment .

Back to what I know

So it has been a week. A week of reading papers and textbooks and trying to learn what the different cell lines and genes and tissues are. I've had some success - yesterday I attended the MIPS (Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford) seminar, and I actually understood a few of the things the speaker said. Not much of what he said, but it was a comfort to see I had made some progress.

Enough is enough. My brain is melting and I can't read any more papers and textbooks. At least, I can't occupy 8 hours a day with it. While I feel like I've fought to have my new "research life" look very different from my old one, I can feel myself going back into the same pattern. I need to go back to what is comforting, what I know. Unfortunately, this also is what will piss me off: computers.

Now, the slide already began a few days ago. The Stanford MedWiki (my group has their internal site on it) is done in Confluence. So I set up a personal space to take notes on all of the stuff trying to force its way into my brain (and complained about the lack of plugins). Now I'm spiraling further down. First, I'm upgrading my laptop. Sure, I used to be one of the first to upgrade. Then I realized how much time I was 'wasting' configuring my laptop. It is time for some upgrades, file clean up, and configuration! This will kill what, 2 weeks?

Truly, what I am after is simulation software. I found a medical suite using GEANT4 that I wanted to start playing with. I wanted to try to radiate some stuff and see what happens. My initial plan was to run everything locally, so the simulations would take some time - I could still do some reading while all of this is going on. GAMOS has a binary for Ubuntu 10.04, which is why I'm upgrading.

So I go back to the land of computers. Since I have to wait 1.5 weeks to get my animal training and over a month to get my radiation training, this was more-or-less inevitable. Hopefully bricking my laptop isn't...