Project Title: Searching for Substages of Melanoma by Quantifying Disorder in Tumor Architecture
BASIS Advisor: Dr. Murthy
Internship Location: Stanford University
Onsite Mentor: Dr. David Nguyen, Dr. Rajendra Singh
Melanoma is a skin cancer that presents itself in the form of moles that behave in a way not typical to normal moles. There are three classifications of melanoma: Cutaneous Melanoma (melanoma of the skin), Mucosal Melanoma (melanoma of mucous membranes), and Ocular Melanoma (melanoma of the eye). Treatment for melanoma varies from stage to stage; however, it can generally be cured through surgery, radiation treatment, medications, and sometimes chemotherapy. The current method of staging melanoma skin cancer is the TNM system that considers the features of the tumor, whether or not cancer cells have spread to lymph nodes, and whether or not cancer cells have metastasized to other organs. The "T," or tumor, aspect of the TNM system measures histological features of the tumor, such as the thickness of the tumor, the number of cells that are activity dividing, and whether ulceration has occurred. These features limit the ability of a pathologist to stratify melanomas into more refined T categories that may make the TNM staging system more accurate. In this project, I will use resources at Stanford University to apply the Quadrant Slope Index (QSI) algorithm to hematoxylin & eosin images of melanoma to determine if it can quantitatively stratify early stage from late stage melanomas.
My Posts
Melanoma Week 12
May 12, 2019
Last week of research!! This was easily the most stressful week of all because of the final project being just a week away. I had several calls with Dr. Nguyen, my outside advisor, to talk about what results I have to show and what a poster I make about my findings should look like. I […]
Melanoma Week 11
May 04, 2019
This week, I was able to work on more QSI plots with my external advisor, and I continued working on my presentation for my final project. I have also started to figure out what I want my poster to look like. I hope to make it very visual and organized in a way that is […]
Melanoma Week 10
Apr 28, 2019
This was a very stressful week for me. I thought I would get my QSI plot images, but instead, I was stuck re-annotating my images because of some of my nuclei identifications being incorrect, and though my advisor did not pick this up immediately, the QSI plot results helped determine there was something wrong with […]
Melanoma Week 9
Apr 22, 2019
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 […]
Melanoma Week 8
Apr 15, 2019
This week was really busy for me with college tours and all. Besides that, I did have a meeting with my external advisor to talk about results. Much to my surprise, he’s pleased with my progress so far, and wants me to continue my work beyond the duration of this project and well into my […]
Melanoma Week 7
Apr 07, 2019
This week was easily the slowest week of my research so far because of the stress from college decisions. I was not able to annotate nearly as much, and it’s definitely thrown me off and put me behind schedule, so hopefully I’ll be able to recover in the coming weeks. This week I’ll focus particularly […]
Melanoma Week 6
Mar 31, 2019
This week was really unproductive for me, I wasn’t mentally in the state of mind in which I could function properly. There was just a lot of stress because of college admissions decisions coming out and it really got to me. My advisors were very supportive and kept me going. This week, I’ll talk […]
Melanoma Week 5
Mar 24, 2019
This week, with my annotations, I tried to pay attention to varying shapes and sizes of nuclei and where the concentration was higher and where it was lower, relative to other slides I have annotated. I still don’t have any conclusive data, but my advisors are telling me to keep going, saying that every single […]
Melanoma Week 4
Mar 17, 2019
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 […]
Melanoma Week 3
Mar 10, 2019
This week was by far the most stressful yet. Friday night, while annotating my 4th or 5th slide, I stayed up late and fell asleep on my computer. I woke up to find it dead, and when it restarted, all of my progress from the entire week was gone, with the exception of some initial […]
Melanoma Week 2
Feb 28, 2019
Building on what I discussed in my first blog post, I wanted to delve deeper into what exactly Melanoma looks like on the surface level, beyond just the cell samples that I am working with. Melanoma is the existence of atypical moles which show unexpected change or growth. The types of Melanomas are Cutaneous Melanoma (melanoma […]
Melanoma Week 1
Feb 21, 2019
This first week was really interesting, as I started working on researching the background of Melanoma in detail and shared my work with my external advisor. In this project, I am going to be studying and examining minute differences between substages of Melanoma in sample slides in order to potentially identify further substages of Melanoma […]