Monday, September 15, 2008

Monday September 15th, 2008

Well I'm listening to Stevie Wonder on YouTube, and taking vitamins.

I had stir-fry for dinner.
(I'm working backwards)
I did the cupid shuffle with Shirley.
We learned how to do matrix operations and write loops in MATLAB.
finally
because our teacher is back from Russia
he said there were a lots of Russians there.
He saw the Kremlin and said "heh."

I had a weird dream last night that I was trying to do computer programming and decided it would be a good idea to cut part of my right leg off. The reason for this dream I think is that one of my legs is slightly longer than the other so every year for about a week I have hip problems.

I got my contacts today and I got an index card divider and some Lewis Black cds.

I went to a lab meeting at noon at the vialab (Visualization and Image Analysis). www.vialab.org

They're working on a lot of different things.
There were about seven of us.
Dr. Stetten
Bing Wu- post-doc/professor at CMU Carnegie Mellon University
Bo Wang- undergrad at Pitt
Sam Horvath- a girl undergrad at Pitt I think a Junior maybe
Gaurav Shukla- a grad student at Pitt, pre-med wants to be a interventional radiologist
John Galeotti- a post-doc at CMU


John and Dr. Stetten went to MICCAI- the

International Society and Conference Series on

Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention


http://www.miccai.org/

and said that there were a thousand people approaching the same problem(?) in the same way (?) and we needed to come up with more ideas for an original approach in order to convince NIH (National Institute of Health) to give us money for research.


The grant proposals are due Nov. 5th for NIBIB and NHLBI, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.


Dr. Stetten knows someone at the Carnegie Museum. The Science Center is going to have a robotics exhibit, and one of our lab's projects is going to be in there. probably.


It's called a grab-a-slice. It has to do with making better output from a C-T Scan.. but I don't know how much I can tell you. ;)

There's also the OCT Penlight

and Fingersight

and the Big OLED sonic flashlight

and the Big LCD Holographic sonic flashlight


toward the end of the meeting, a delivery guy came with some expensive little piece of computer called a phase only spatial light modulator. Should I explain what that is?


They were all brainstorming to figure out what I could help with. Since Bing Wu is becoming a professor, and he usually works on psychophysical analysis of the projects by himself, Dr. Stetten suggested that I participate in the clinical trials. I don't know what exactly that would entail, but it sounds easy and fun. Psycho physics!!


I like the idea of combining technology with medicine and medical research..

especially

tissue regeneration, cardiovascular mechanics, psychological/ behavioral disorders

In the vialab, they're working on imaging things

like devices for the blind

and better images for use by surgeons and radiologists.

I met Dr. Richard Debski the other day. I asked if I could look around his lab and see what he's working on and I'm going to do that tomorrow morning. He works at the Musculoskeletal Research Center... it's pretty cool.


That's all I have for now, I have to go work on homework.

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