The Last Week

It seems like 10 weeks has flown by, and I am already contemplating how I could have been much more efficient. A whole Trimester to yourself feels like summer, here one moment, and gone the next. On the other hand, my brother disagrees, must be the Advanced Placement exams getting to him.


My internship at Banner University Medical Center Phoenix has been quite the unique experience. I apologize for the randomness in my blog, there are just so many interesting things that I have learned.


Being at Banner and talking to its many inhabitants has given me a widened view of the hospital life and functions. Especially on the aspects of being a doctor. It seems many high school students aim to be doctors without having a full comprehension of the positions functions and nuances. I do not claim to understand what it means to be a doctor either because I am not one myself. But I have developed a newfound respect and sympathy for most doctors out there. At the same time, I feel as though I understand the thinking of Doctors and I believe my bi-annual examinations and appointments will be much more different.


In addition, I have found researchers hilarious. I mean no offense to them and instead covet a high sense of respect. Having read so many research papers and attempted writing my own, I now have a greater understanding of the struggle behind them. For a personal anecdote, I laughed at a group of researchers while working at the admitting department at Mayo. I overheard their discussion on the latest research, articles, and journals and couldn't help but feel a sense of satisfaction that I understood what they were talking about. I am sure this hubris will come back to haunt me someday.


A big thanks to the many people at Banner who allowed me to shadow their departments and explained to me their job function.


Thanks to :
Dr. Woods and the rest of Intravenous Radiology
Dr. Deng, Dr. Hanny, Ms. Mickie and the rest of Radiation Oncology
Al, Dave,  Dr. Sidarius, Kelly, Troy, Fernando, Derrick, Cherisse, Susan
And an extra big thanks to Mr. McCormick, my on-site mentor, for paving the path for these many opportunities.

Careers and Chemistry

With our presentations creeping closer and everybody else posting their results, the peer pressure feels overwhelming. This prompted me to write a 4 page essay on my results (I haven't done the bibliography yet which is going to be horrifyingly horrible). Such is the fate of observational projects.

This week I got to visit the Alzheimers Institute at Banner. It was a relatively new building so everything looked nice and modern (the PET scanners were in a kitchen-like room with wooden cabinets and floors). I also got to see their MRI machine. It's much more powerful and sensitive than the one used for diagnostics in the hospital. Mr. McCormick tried to explain to me the technical side of MRI's but I couldn't grasp my head around it...

In addition, I got to see the hot lab where they were producing TAU (well more like attaching F-18 to the TAU protein). There was a real glove box (o-m-g) and I laughed at it (inside ochem joke). They showed me the room where the proton accelerator was that they were using to make F-18. They had D2O (heavy water) shields around it because neutrinos would fly off and nothing except D2O can stop neutrinos (I thought D2O was only used for space and cosmic particles). Dr. Dan told me to not stay in the room too long because the radiation meter in the room read it at 2 Curies (SOMEONE GET ME OUT OF THIS ROOM) (for a comparison, thyroid chemo therapy is 60-160 milliCuries which is designed to kill your thyroid tissue).

I then proceeded to watch them tell the computer to make the TAU. TAU is a new drug designed to tell if a person has Alzheimer's or not. The natural TAU protein attaches to certain platelets (I forgot to actual term... might as well just say molecule) when a person has Alzheimer's. Fernando (a co-worker) told me that TAU isn't perfected yet because the presence of the platelets/molecules does not 100% indicate that the person has Alzheimer's but all people with Alzheimer's have platelets/molecules that show up. They are also using TAU to test for concussion damage (that one case study that Zach and Roshan did). The F-18 in the TAU drug has a half-life of 110 minutes, so it needs to be used pretty soon. On the day I was there, they were making a batch to send to Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale (Shoutout to anyone over there :D). They also have charter planes that they fly over to other places like UC Davis.

If you feel like reading on TAU stuff :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702832/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299725/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2779007/

Random fact : (I read in a Nature magazine that back in 2014, anything funded by the U.S. government were pressured into making their research public before a year was up. Apparently research papers are just as painful to scientists)


I feel myself glowing with pride knowing that the Alzheimer institute has automated chemical reactions (I have no idea where this sense of rivalry came up... I can't even use the machine). They have a computer with all the reactions in it. The ChemoBox (I just came up a name for the chemical reaction machine... I didn't take a picture =(...) has 9 test tubes on a rack in the back and then a bunch of vials in the middle where everything goes on. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to remember organic chemistry and then another 30 minutes trying to find out how they made it. (They added HCl and then dMSO w/ TAU natural protein and then NaOH.... is that even allowed?...). Apparently only the head of the chem lab knew the actual organic chemistry behind the reaction (the reaction isn't released yet but I think it is pretty simple once you have the right stuff.... HUBRIS... it probably isn't simple). I think I've settled on an E2 reaction.

All the machines had a FEDERAL sticker attached to them because it's funded by the government (the government must feel an enormous need to claim equipment that they provide...). I was told that in an actual big chem lab, everyone would usually just be assigned to a single job and that would be it (one guy does part of the reaction and then the other person does the quality check etc. all day). It really made me sad to think that chem work was similar to normal jobs.

Some other things about my project :

Apparently Guanine is the most commonly oxidized nucleotide (easily altered). This is because it has a higher HOMO than the others (ochem kids :D). But if there are 2 G's (guanine) next to each other, then it is more difficult to oxidize them because they will share electrons. But if there are 3 G's in a row, then the middle G will be oxidized (because it is more stable). More factors to put into my project (weeps).

Also Technesium-99 (the radionuclide that I will be using in my project) will be having its production cut in 2016 because the nuclear reactor in Canada will stop making it. There are some other solutions that people have come up to fix the problem but I don't think there has been a lot of progress (they needed 100 million more dollars before they could start (back in 2014)).

Well, until next time! (sorry for the mass of text, I hope my comments made it interesting).

Slow Weeeek

While flipping through my list of sources, I have started to feel a little down. I feel as though my project's design isn't top tier because there are so many factors! Mr. Bloom's words about questions being too vague or too specific are starting to haunt me. 

I had a small revelation while doing some of my calculations. The big factor setting CT and Nuclear Medicine methods apart is the time difference. While CT can do its scans in seconds, Nuclear Medicine methods take a few hours. I initially thought that it was just a matter of convenience, but after considering it a little more I realized that the time a scan takes up might affect the patient's psychology. Doctors can immediately prescribe a patient a CT scan, but not always a Nuc Med scan. Nuc Med might not be available at night or during the weekends (depending on how extensive the Nuc Med department is at the hospital). If the patient's status isn't too bad, the doctor might give the patient an appointment the following day or week for a scan. The patient might be feeling panic and want immediate attention, or feel anxiety while waiting for or during the scan. From my experience at Mayo Clinic, there have been quite a few patients that have been upset about the time spent waiting or just sitting around. 

A surprising source of information that I have found is "possible radiation exposure of people traveling to Mars". Apparently one of the rover on Mars has measured the amount of radiation it has been exposed to after going through a few storms. It has received about half a Sievert through the storms. In total, it has received 2/3s (.6666) of a Sievert. If humans were exposed to .6666 Sieverts, the rate of cancer deaths would increase from 21% to 24% (21% is from the national cancer institute). My coworker also says that my badge (checks for radiation absorbed) wouldn't probably receive a huge increase unless I went on a plane. Apparently cosmic radiation isn't a thing to scoff at (PRAISE OZONE). 

Well that's all for this week (it was pretty short).

Until next time! 

SRP Week 6 : Books made of Papers

It has been quite a while since my last post! A lot of events have transpired since then but thanks for sticking with me so far~!

A major resource that I have found at Banner is it's medical library. When I first entered it, I thought it was just a small room with a single shelf of books to the side and computers at the far end. Turns out the single shelf of books are just reference books if the doctors need an immediate source (some chapters have more than 200 references... ). The majority of books are stored in the section called the "Stacks" (so cool!!! the name that is [I'm pretty sure that's a generic name but oh well]. Reminds me of Name of the Wind). The Stacks is pretty much a giant collection of journals, textbooks and a few novels. Some of these books are older than I am!

I initially searched for something related to the genetic component of gastronomy. I wanted to find a specific organ that I could use to calculate the dose absorption and was wondering how various sections developed cancer. Although I did find a few books, they were very difficult to read. Initially it took me about 15 minutes to read a single page because I had to search up every single word I didn't know (and there were a lot) and the background to the term. Eventually I realized that most of the information that I was looking for is close to the end. The passages of medical journals seem to be similar to mathematical proofs except instead of numbers, there are words. I've decided to stick with the liver at the moment because of my previous interaction with the theraspheres.

I've grown particularly fond of scientific magazines, especially Nature and Science. When I read these magazines, I feel as though I am part of an elite group of people who can read scientific articles. I am sure this hubris will eventually come back to bite me in a posterior area. There was an article in Nature that particularly interested me titled "MTH1 inhibition eradicates cancer by preventing sanitation of the dNTP pool"(the article only has MTH and NTP capitalized...). I have an extremely vague idea what the article is saying and can only grasp at a few important things (thank goodness I can understand a professional scientific abstract (I now know why abstracts are so important)). But pretty much it talks about dNTP pools which are the building blocks of nucleic acids and how they are oxidized which mess up the DNA chains (super shortened explanation).

Pretty much all I am saying is that there are dozens of factors (like Protein Kinase Inhibitors) that I have probably not taken into account. I can only probably attempt to find the possible number of mutations.

While I knew that multiple codons coded for the same amino acid, I did not take them into account. Although I found molecular biology fascinating, the amount of variables that codon usage bias would introduce would destroy my brain. Masatoshi Nei why you do this to meeeeeee (I spent a whole day just reading up on molecular biology literature even though I have no use for genetic evolution).

Another factor that I did not think of when analyzing dose absorption is the breathing patterns of the body. Because your body continually moves with each breath cycle, the exposure rates start to differ (basically your body is constantly moving and the dose absorbed changes with that). Although the change in the amount of dose absorbed is probably very small, it should not be completely ignored. In medical imaging, they have ways to get around breathing cycles by doing gate-controlled imaging (I think that's what it's called). And there is something called manifold learning which is an automated program/algorithm that balances out the image/data. So when you add in breathing into your image, you get into 4D imaging (so cool right?) and apparently it can go up to 6D imaging if you take into account all of the factors (I don't have a great idea on how that works).

Manifold learning : (I imagine this is what it looks like?...)

I have slowly been able to read research papers (although most of it has too much context for me to make head or toes of it). There was one discussing the development of making new organic compounds (I understood about 2/50 of the reactions) and another having a heated debate over catalysis (catalysis = the increasing of the rate of a chemical reaction)\(apparently the exact reaction of catalysis has not been agreed on yet?)). (People can calculate the number of electron transfers to palladium? cool)

I have found the exact copy of the article discussing the bad luck factor in cancer rates (reference week 3). What it is actually discussing is the possibility of genetic corruption based upon stem cell replication. The data from the actual article was somewhat lacking and only provided a few graphs discussing log 10 values. But perhaps I can gleam a little more from the references the authors use.

My current favorite book in the library is On Being a Doctor 2. It provides great stories and insight into the world of patients and doctors. In addition, it addresses multiple viewpoints and beliefs.

Well thanks for reading! Until next time!

SRP Week 5 : Dosimetry

It seems hard to believe that it has been 5 weeks since our 2nd trimester has ended. I never thought I would say this, but I truly do sometimes miss school. I have been trying to continue learning by reading books and watching videos, but it feels so different from learning at school. I keep on expecting a period change to a new class or 5 minute breaks between every 50 minutes of reading to talk to somebody. It feels like I am studying 60+ hours for an exam that I am never going to take.

Recently I have been trying to relearn Chinese. I never really did try hard at Chinese School and my parents told me I would regret it when I was older. I truly feel the brunt of that pressure now (Feeling regret and I'm only 18 years old). I have tried to dabble a little in Japanese and Korean. My friend Sonya tells me that Japanese is easier than Korean and she occasionally helps me with my pronunciation. I walk around in my backyard saying "are" or "arigatou" or "wakaranai" and the occasional "cake" (Japanese "cake" is different from the English version where the "a" is more like an elongated "e". To me, it sounds like k-ee-k-i which is still probably wrong). Sonya says that, if I can learn the R/L sound, I can sound less foreign and possibly surprise someone.

I have been finishing up the second book that Mr. McCormick has given me. The title is Physics in Nuclear Medicine. I tried to learn by osmosis, but that never seems to work. Dr. Deng says that Radiobiology for the Radiologist is the so-called bible for the physicist and radiologists, I might check that book out sometime. The good thing about Physics in Nuclear Medicine (and probably any good medical book) is that it has a whole bibliography section after every chapter. I can look up the individual articles/books that it mentions and find even more details. It has has a whole 6 pages of tables, telling me the S-values of the entire human body for different radionuclides. That will help immensely in my calculations. It feels too basic if I do a Dosimetry of the epithelial tissue and internal organs with the given values by the book. I will probably also do a comparison of the histograms in the database with a scan from a Phantom (I need Mr. McCormick to do it because I can't touch the radionuclides in the hot lab).

I have a better understanding of why CT and x-ray have a growth in the amount of radiation dosage. In general for all medical imaging, the amount of exposure has decreased. The only exception is CT. The reason is that even with the amount of technological improvements, CT requires more dosage to improve image quality. So when they do a chest CT with contrast, they have to increase the dosage to have a good image of the blood vessels in the chest. There has been a big debate between using a chest CT with contrast or a VQ nuclear medicine scan. There are good arguments on both sides, but a big factor is that many doctors are comfortable with looking at CT-images. Even though a VQ can give around 90% probability and some additional details, doctors are afraid of the remaining 10% of uncertainty.

Although there is probably a 1-2 difference in mSv (milli Sievert) between CT and Radionuclides, it is the amount of CT's used by the hospital that makes the difference. Say a patient comes into the Emergency room with chest pain and wants to talk to a physician. By the time the patient talks to a physician, there is no more chest pain. The physician is pretty sure that the patient has no issues. But because the hospital does not want to be sued in case the patient does, the physician tells the patient to have a CT scan done. CT is so convenient, cheap, accurate, and efficient, physicians can tell patients to get one anytime. If a doctor doesn't have the images yet because of paperwork, he can just tell the patient to take another one and it will be done in 5 minutes.

Physics in Nuclear Medicine says that immediate radiation is much more damaging than prolonged radiation. I do not know if the effective radiation dose takes into account the different types of radiation, but if you compare the time difference between a Nuclear Medicine scan and a CT scan, the CT scan dose is probably quicker by factors of 10.

I am slowly getting the hang of the concept of radiation usage. By next week, I hope to have a calculated model of an internal organ, such as the stomach (that seems like an important organ to BASIS kids).

Mata ne! (See you later!)

Phillip Yang

SRP Week 4 : Locked On

I am constantly reminded of the complexity and precision of the medical field and its administration. It took me a while to see how researchers and doctors systemically carve away new discovers and modify procedures and guidelines. But in order to keep this sort of complexity, there is division of labor and specialization. I think I am ranting about social structure now, my apologies.

It feels as though every new idea I have has already been done by someone else or a government agency. My initial idea was to use manifolds to determine tissue structure and calculate the probability of irradiation. Turns out, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has already calculated out the risk factors for different types of tissues. The unit of Sieverts is an actual measure of health effect on different types of tissues. The information about the effective radiation dosage (Sieverts) is found easily on the internet.

Effective radiation dosage gives a good general idea about the possibility of adverse effects caused by radiation with different types of scans. The issue is that nature of each scan differ from each other and the risk changes per individual. Generally, Computed Tomography (CT) and x-ray will affect the superficial parts of your body: the skin and some tissue below that. Radioisotopes are more spread around the interior of the body because it is injected intravenously.

You would think that Radioisotopes would be more harmful because it is entering the interior of the body where everything is more vulnerable. It is true in some aspects, but the radioisotopes will be in your blood flow for a little while before it is taken up by the organs. The main source of irradiation from radioisotopes is where they accumulate. Eventually your body will remove the radioisotopes through the digestive and urinary systems. Your digestive and urinary systems are actually very hardy and already receive damage from stomach acids and bodily wastes. There might be some lingering fears about radioisotopes going to sensitive areas of the body like the brain. The thing is, radionuclides are different from CT and x-ray because it gives off radiation over time, unlike the direct hit from CT. So for the initial hour the radionuclides are in your body, the amount of radiation absorbed is actually small and generally insignificant. Assuming that your body takes about 6-10 hours to process and excrete wastes, the radioisotope is in your blood stream (entire body) for about an hour, where it will then decrease as it is taken up by the targeted organ for while and then excreted in another few hours. The amount of concentration when it is in the blood stream is minimal and it is only when radionuclides enters the targeted organ or digestive/urinary systems that there is enough concentration and radiation to be significant.

Aside from all that technical stuff, I got to visit Banner's Radiation Oncology. Oncology is involved with treatment of cancer and they use radiation to solve the problems. I was shown around by Dr. Hanny, Dr. Deng, and Ms. Mickie, medical physicists who work in Radiation Oncology. A big part of cancer treatment in Radiation Oncology is Stereotatic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT). This is basically surgery using radiation.

In SBRT, the people are using linear accelerators to slam electrons/protons into your body. The Mayo Clinic in Phoenix is currently constructing their proton accelerator building (sidenote). In x-ray and CT, most of the radiation is absorbed by the skin and superficial tissues. By changing the x-ray used, the payload can be deposited deeper into the body. Although the skin will absorb a chunk of it, most will go through towards the target. Then it is the precise obliteration of the tumor (I am romanticizing this too much I think). To be more in-depth, it is not the radiation that is actually destroying the cells. The electrons/protons shot from the linear accelerator (nearly at the speed of light), will interact with the atoms to generate x-rays. The x-rays, with oxygen (O2) and water (H2O), will generate a hydroxyl radical (OH free radical). The hydroxyl radical is highly attracted to DNA, which will then disrupt the structure of the DNA. Because SBRT is 7000 times stronger than CT, destruction is assured (I am totally blowing this out of proportion).

Hydroxyl Radical damage to Guanine :

Linear Accelerator :

The planning of SBRT to irradiate a brain tumor. The physicists need to construct a plan prior to irradiation. They will try to spread out the dosage over a large area of skin. This is because several shots of 7000rem will destroy the skin as well. So if you spread it out over a large area, the dose given to the skin is much lower. Sometimes hitting sensitive structures is inevitable, and the doctors will have to decide the tradeoff. There is always a tradeoff in SBRT, because there is a splash spreading effect of radiation as well. Basically, in an exaggerated situation (probably unlikely but this is what it is like), the doctor has to decide to irradiate your eyes, giving you a 25% chance of getting cataracts, or your Cochlea in your ear, which might lead to hearing loss. The program (the amount of programming that goes into medical programs is so impressive) will do a hundred iterations after the physicist puts in base values. Then there is the fine tuning of the plan where the doctor decides if the values are acceptable.

Cancer cells have a different radiation toleration compared to regular cells because of their irregular growth and structure. This gives a small gap where you can destroy a major portion of the cancer cells at the cost of some normal cells : 

Please feel free to ask lots of questions. After 2 hours in Radiation Oncology I ran out of questions to ask and I felt completely incompetent. Asking good questions is a very difficult skill to master.

Until Next Time! 

-Phillip Yang

SRP Week 3 : And That Is Why There are Professionals and Wikipedia Is Not Always Right

This week at Good Sam introduced me to quite a few unique experiences. 

Dr. Sidarius, our Radiologist in Nuc Med, allowed me to shadow him for a morning to see what a Radiologist generally does. There weren't a lot of interesting cases that morning but I was able to see how he interacted with regular patients. It was interesting to see how he interacted with patients and his own professional work discipline. I watched how Dr. Sidarius kept a positive attitude during the day and when he explained the scan results to the patients. A large amount of his work with patients is reassuring them that things are ok, even if the results were not the best. It seems emotionally exhausting having to constantly maintain a positive attitude when one has to deal with the emotional and physical problems of patients. It was during this week when the fact struck me, that almost everyone coming in has cancer or is a cancer survivor. It makes me wonder about the fear and stress that the patients are experiencing. 

There was a patient that recently had a skin tumor removed. Dr. Sidarius was going to inject a radioisotope to determine if there was any contamination of the lymph nodes. If there was, then those lymph nodes would have to be removed and the patient might have to receive a whole body scan to make sure that the cancer has not metastasized. The patient told me how teenagers are not mentally mature enough to realize the importance of sunscreen and how when they reach 40 years old they will regret it. I nodded my head in agreement. 

Dr. Sidarius told me that the radiation dosage absorbed by radioisotopes is much less than the dosage absorbed by CT or X-ray scans. This surprised me because I was under the assumption that they had somewhat similar absorbed dosages. He explained to me how SPECT-CT and PET-CT scans provide more information than regular CT scans. For example, you can see on a CT-scan that, after therapy, a tumor may have the same mass and size prior to therapy. But in a PET-CT, the radiologist could say that although the mass and size may be the same, it is all dead tissue, and the tumor is not functional. The difference between PET-CT and SPECT-CT is the radioisotope used. PET-CT uses smaller isotopes such as Oxygen 15 (which is made by smashing a Deuteron with a Nitrogen-14 in a fusion reaction). Oxygen 15 gives off a positron which will interact with a free electron and combine, releasing gamma radiation in two directions. The PET machine then calculates the exact location by analyzing the distance traveled by the gamma rays.

I asked Dr. Sidarius, that if PET-CT and SPECT-CT are so effective and radioisotopes do less damage than CT-Scans, then why is there not a huge shift to PET and SPECT-CT? The reason seems to boil down to jobs and money. There are also various schools of thought in Medical Imaging and some of the "old-timers" are adamant about using CT-scans and measuring the millimeter change in anything. I am told that the next big step in Medical Imaging is a PET-MRI. The PET-MRI will get rid of the CT portion of the scan, and thus minimize the amount of radiation absorbed. I get the feeling that the CT-scan is a brute force scan like getting hosed, while Radioisotopes and MRI are more of a finesse scan. 

I was also told how Iodine chemotherapy works. The body is dosed with TSH, which forces thyroid cells to take up Iodine. If there is any metastasis of thyroid cells, they will also absorb TSH. The patient then will take in 60-200 mCi (that's a lot) of Iodine-131. Iodine-131 will then damage the thyroid cell's functions beyond repair, thus preventing the thyroid cells from ever absorbing Iodine again and never producing Thyroid hormones. There are a lot of regulations regarding how the patient should act after the therapy (they are a literal walking source of radiation). The patient should not stand within 6ft of another person for extended periods of time to prevent the destruction of the other person's thyroid gland. The patient should also go to the bathroom and drink water every hour to prevent the accumulation of I-131 in the urine system (about 40% of the I-131 dose is absorbed by the thyroid gland). 

In the afternoon, I got to see the Therasphere injection for a patient with Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Liver Cancer). Mr. McCormick got me set up with Dr. Woods to watch the "operation". My assumptions about Therasphere chemotherapy are not exactly correct. Therasphere, Yttrium-90, is actually sometimes the first treatment people opt for to combat their liver cancer. Also, the SIR-sphere, which causes clots, is actually not the optimal therapy. Dr. Woods says that he prefers the cancer get some oxygen. The reason is that the chemical reaction to destroy the DNA requires oxygen, and for radiation to actually kill tumors, it needs to rip and damage the DNA to the extent that the cells cannot replicate. This type of therapy can only be used on the Liver because the liver has a dual blood supply: the portal vein and it's artery. The veins of all the organs in the abdomen group up to fuse into the portal vein which will then go to the liver, which provides a little oxygen. Dr. Woods says that the portal vein is the reason why doctors can abuse the Liver's artery so much. 

The actual Intravenous Radiology room for the "operation" is very amazing. I wish I could have taken a picture but it is not allowed because of HIPAA laws and the patient is in the room. There is a giant screen hanging from the ceiling next to the operating table which shows the live X-ray images. There is a blippy wave reading thing for reading the patient's heart rate and stuff (I have no idea what to call it). There are enormous rails on the ceiling for the CT-scanner and camera. 

So something like this =  

 The previous guidelines to Therasphere therapy is 120Gy (Grey which is radiation/Volume (my interpretation)) for the whole one side of a liver. Now, there is a new way using Radiation Segmentectomy. This is concentrating the theraspheres to the area of the tumor. So instead of the whole part of the liver, it will go to the 1/4 where the tumors are. Dr. Woods would bring up the radiation dose to the tumor to 200Gy which is basically enough to kill anything. So part of the liver is dead, but at least so is the cancer. The problem with previous guidelines is that there would be some cancer cells left in the Liver which would require other therapies. There are a bunch of articles and research done on Radiation Segmentectomy which surprised me. I would think that something like changing the procedure by a little would not matter a lot, but it seems that any change in guidelines requires a lot of experiment and research. It goes to show how advance and secure the medical guidelines are. 

On Friday, I had a sudden revelation watching the histogram of a patient. The histogram shows the amount of gamma rays detected and the strength of the rays. I can compare the patient's histogram to the pure source and then calculate the difference between the two. Unfortunately the machine only picks up rays that are parallel to the tubes in the detectors so I will have to take that into account. This means going back to learning manifolds (Much to Mrs. Bailey's Delight).

It also appears that Cell Division rates bring up different results on Google than Mitotic rates (Makes no sense to me... Must be the connotations *sigh* ). Mr. McCormick was about to bring up statistics about the turn over rates in less than 15 minutes whereas it took me about 2 hours of fruitless research to come up with nothing. I now know that I will be narrowing my research down to the radiation absorption rates and chance of cancer in epithelial tissue (skin and the guts in the abdominal area). There is an article talking about how "bad luck" influences cancer rates. I have not read too much into it, but it seems that 60-80% of cancer is generated by "bad luck". This does not mean that 60-80% of cancer rates are coincidental; multiple factors cause cancer. Also, the majority of cancer develops from stem cells in the body. I did not know this at all but apparently it is common knowledge in the medical field. Because Stem Cells are similar to being "blueprints", if they are mutated, the chance of it getting out of control increases by an enormous amount. This makes me think about Stem-Cell research and if those stem cells are more susceptible to cancer. Because the mitotic rates might be different and the surrounding cells might cause some changes (I am thinking of the sheep clone, Dolly, where it developed some sort of cancer while it was young. I think my correlation is off though).

I was going to attach my 3 page rant on Healthcare, American Society, the Middle Class, and International policy as well but it seems like this blog post is already dense and grueling enough. So see you guys next time!

Last thing : I keep on underestimating the human body! I got to watch an injected radioisotope in real time move through the aorta and to the arteries and back to the heart within 30 seconds.