Melanoma Week 4

This week was pretty slow for me. Just looking at the slides seemed like so much work because of by how much and how greatly the content of my slides has increased. My initial intentions to power through several slides each week were crushed when the format of the slides changed – they are now much more intricate than the ones I started off with. There are more nuclei to be annotated, and some of them are bunched more closely together. What this results in is a lot of overlapping lines which I have to fix right away, as the QSI algorithm cannot recognize my annotations if they are not individual units. A new thing I learned about Fiji is that you can only undo your most recent annotation – any annotations made before that are set in stone unless you have a saved version of what you want to undo. This led to a few do-overs, as I had to ensure that the QSI algorithm would recognize patterns in my work. Obviously all these do-overs with new technology that I am relatively inexperienced with is quite frustrating, but I’m glad that I’m getting to experience these blunders early on so that I won’t have to deal with any surprises as the senior project deadline approaches.

Simultaneously, I have been working on the R coding language, and my external advisor shared some scripts with me regarding his QSI algorithm. They’re still beyond my understanding, but looking over them gave me some insight as to what I’m trying to get out of the coding lessons that I’m doing. I look forward to getting to understand the code and apply it to my own work to generate results.