Summer Research

    It’s summer now, has been for over a month.  Time flies.  Don’t worry about it.  Sometimes I do.  This time I don’t.  I don’t know why.  To my friends from back home, sorry to have missed your graduations and parties.  I’ll be home for a few weeks this summer.  We’ll catch up then I hope.  ‘til then enjoy the sun.  And to my college friends who are scattered across the globe right now, enjoy your various adventures.  I’ll see you when the fall semester begins, unless you graduated.  In which case, you have my best wishes in your pursuits.

    I’m still in Wheaton.  I’m doing research in the physics department for ten weeks.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means.  I didn’t really know what it meant until I started doing it.  I’m living in some “on campus” apartments which are farther from campus than a lot of “off campus” housing.  It’s about an eight minute walk to the science building where I work every morning.  I work from about 8:30 to 5:00 Monday through Friday.  For the most part I’m working on a computer that whole time.  The schedule itself is pretty interesting.  I guess it’s what most people do every day.  It’s actually been a lot more relaxing than the school year was, finishing class around 3 or 4, Glee Club, Tolkien Society or small group activities until about 7 and then studying until three or four in the morning.  I’ll admit I get distracted easily, so it’s not as intense as that makes it sound, but I had a pretty rough year.  I’ve always been skeptical whenever I’ve heard a working adult say “enjoy your college years, as soon as you graduate you’ll have to deal with all the stresses of working a real job for the rest of your life.”  I’ve always suspected that a full time job couldn’t possibly be as stressful as my college schedule.  Well, I’m sure there are exceptions, but so far I’m liking the 9 to 5 no homework thing.

    People also say that Wheaton is a ghost town over the summer.  Myth #2 busted.  It’s definitely quieter, but in my personal experience, there’s plenty going on.  Of course, I got lucky.  I happen to have five great friends from my floor living two apartment complexes down working for the college doing maintenance.  I happen to know a bunch of the other researchers in my apartment building and I’m in a full stairwell, plus I happen to know some of the staff and professors decently well.  Honestly it’s been pretty great socially.  It’s easy to find some space tor read or get away, but it’s also pretty easy to round up some friends and have some fun.

    Research has been interesting in a lot of ways.  Maybe it’s a little weird for someone who wants to be a teacher to be doing research as a resume booster.  I think it makes sense though.  For one thing, if a student ever asks what kind of career you can go into from studying physics, I’ll know first hand.  Also, if I ever teach at the college level, some research background might come in handy.  I also like learning for learning sake, and I’ve definitely learned a lot too.  I know a lot more about ultrasound technology than I ever thought I would, and I’ve also gotten some practice with computer programming which I’ve hardly done anything with in the past.

    Basically my project consists of testing a computer program that measures the diameter of a carotid artery lumen.  The lumen is the cavity or the space between the walls of the artery.  There are a lot of different steps, and I tend to go back and forth between all of them, working on one thing until I hit a dead end, then working in another area while I wait for an e-mail or a mental breakthrough.  The final project seems pretty simple, take some ultrasound images of carotid arteries, measure the actual diameters, run the videos through the program (WALDO) and see whether WALDO gets them right.  Really it should be pretty simple, but the whole point of research is that you’re doing something no one else has ever done before.  It turns out, there tend to be a lot of obstacles when you’re doing something no one has ever done before.  You know the Thomas Edison quote about finding so many ways not to make a light bulb.  That actually makes a lot of sense now, narrowing down all the possibilities and taking the time to try them all in the hopes that something works.  I don’t know if all research is like that, but it sure fits my experience.  When I finish a day of  work, that’s usually how I measure my success, “well I can check that off the list, I now know that the bmp_getfile program is not where the zooming problem is coming from.”

    One major piece of my work has been trying to collect good images that simulate carotid arteries well.  We need to have images that are similar to real  blood vessels because we want to know that WALDO works with real vessels.  If it gets us correct diameters images that are completely different, it won’t do us any good.  It would be like testing an apple peeler on oranges.  So to get images that look like arteries, we use phantoms, which are basically tubes (I’ve used latex and brass, brass didn’t work very well) suspended in gelatin, so the gelatin is supposed to look like soft tissues (like fat, skin, or muscle) and the tubes are supposed to look like the walls of the vessel.  We’ve built a few phantoms and we also bought a commercially produced phantom.  The commercial one doesn’t have any tubes, just fluid suspended in gel.  There are also a lot of variations of settings on the ultrasound machine which affect the image.  It’s surprisingly easy to get some image from an ultrasound machine and surprisingly hard to get a good one.

    The other major piece is working with WALDO itself.  It’s a pretty old program and the core piece of it that we’re trying to test is the actual algorithm that measures the diameter, but there’s all kinds of peripheral stuff around the program that lets someone use it.  It had some glitches when I started working with it, and I’ve been making edits to the program in order to get it to run smoothly. 

Today there was an interesting surprise and at the last minute Dr. Poelarends asked me to help him at the observatory.  There must have been about a thousand people from the area who all came to see Venus pass in front of the sun, so I worked one of the telescopes and was adjusting it to make sure the sun was always in view while people stood in line to see the transit.  If you want to know more about the transit and what we did at the observatory follow this link: http://wheaton.edu/Academics/Departments/Physics/Astronomical-Observatory