Melanoma Week 9

This week, I spent a lot of time working on the QSI plots with my external advisor. The QSI plots are a representation of the data I’ve collected over the past few weeks. What QSI stands for is the Quadrant Slope Index. The purpose of the QSI system is to detect any discrepancies between normal cells and cancerous cells. What the QSI method is doing for me is detecting what the differences and ranges of nuclei sizes are in the samples I examined. There is a code that needs to be understood to fully internalize the method, and it’s taking me a while to get there, because I’m not particularly comfortable with R just yet, even though I have been working on his R lessons since week 1, for which he quizzes me frequently. Another issue that is coming up is that not all the nuclei I marked up were actually nuclei that needed to be considered. For one sample, for instance, I was supposed to be looking at just the cancer-infected nuclei, but there were small regions in the image that had nuclei that had not actually been affected yet, and I still included them in my annotations. Because of that, and because of the fact there is no way to undo mistakes on the Fiji platform, it’s really difficult to fix this mistake, but we’re working on it. I’m hoping to have all my plots generated by the end of this week! Looking forward to sharing my rough draft presentation with Dr. Murthy.