Rachel Matthews - Dr. Gauthier - Week 7

 This week, I observed a carotid endarterectomy, where the surgeons opened the patient's carotid artery to remove plaque build-up. First, the surgeons had to push aside the surrounding structures to create a clear view of the carotid. Once they were ready to occlude the vessel they had the anesthesiologist increase the patient's blood pressure to help compensate and increase blood profusion to the brain and the rest of the the head from other vessels. Once occluded the surgeons had about 45 minutes to work comfortably before there was an increased risk of stroke. To open the carotid, the surgeons first made a small incision into the wall and then used a special pair of scissors to lengthen the cut. Once open, the surgeons began carefully scraping the vessel's walls to remove the plaque, careful not to damage the rest of the opposite wall. The plaque was stiff and had calcified portions that crumbled when scrapped. Once they had finished, they began carefully sewing up the vessel wall and tested the vessel's integrity by releasing the carotid and allowing blood to flow. Once the carotid was repaired, they decreased the patient's blood pressure and closed the surgical site. 

For research, I was able to run two different comparison tests to compare the masks generated by the new pipeline to ones that were edited by readers. Using ImageJ I ran a program to calculate Pearson's correlation coefficient and I wrote a short MATLAB script to calculate the Sørensen-Dice coefficient which is another statistical tool used to measure the similarity between two images. This data was then compared to what I saw visually and showed that overall the images were similar. However, the new pipeline was still missing many of the features highlighted by reviewers. Additionally, I began trying to run another pipeline and similarly compare its results.