Hangin’ with my new friends!

It’s been a bust first week in Paths-UP.  First getting oriented into the program and determining our overall goal.  Then working on obtaining the necessary programming skills to perform the upcoming work

At the start, we met our Mentor Yong who is now like a shepherd with 6 blind sheep.

We got to take a tour of the scalable health lab and see some of the research going on there.  We then started reading some papers as a group.  Suddenly we are trying to understand what a photoplesmogram (PPG) is and how to use them.

So, a PPG is a time based plot of the absorption of light at a certain place (in the case of our work – a region of the face).  The concept is that when there is higher blood volume in that particular region, more light will by absorbed by the blood and the signal to our camera will decrease.  We can track the changes in the intensity of light to generate the PPG.  The PPG then can be interpreted to track things such as Pulse Rate and Pulse Rate Variability which are indicators of general health.

The value of PPG is it is non-contact way of collecting vital data.  It can hopefully be used through simple web-cams and camera phones with no additional hard-ware at the test subjects site.

However, there are some major difficulties to overcome:

1. Camera technology has difficulty recognizing in darker skin
2. Changes in lighting during capture
3. Motion of the subject

Currently we are working on the basics.  We are trying to get the base facial recognition software up and running on our computers.

In order to prepare for the intense coding part of this project, I spent much of the week first reviewing the Python: Absolute Beginner course from EdX and then completing the certification thru the Python: Fundamentals course.  I can now write simple code as seen below, but more importantly, can start to understand more complex code.

Is that your FACE?

June 24th, 2019 by gaj4

Today was a breaking point for me (you wouldn’t know but I came here with almost zero python knowledge).  As our mission, we are trying to get ppg from a webcam.  This algorithm has many steps, for me, it has many more steps.

1 learn python

2 color thresholding

3 face and eye recognition

4 making frame to get data

5 take the averages of data and make an output.

Finally, I am done with the first three steps.

Day 1 my mentor had me attempt cell culture, any mistake can ruin your cells. Needless to say I was a shaky mess! 10 days later, I can do it solo with my lab book closed!

Cell culture is also known as splitting cells, it is the process in which cells are grown under controlled conditions, usually outside their natural environment. After the cells of interest have been isolated  they can later be maintained under carefully controlled conditions.

My mentor wants to develop genetic circuits in cell plasmids to increase protein production for medical use. The cells she has me working on will take on the genetic circuit she’s designing and fingers crossed they work!

Hope everyone has a great week, it’s already week 3 guys!

I got to spend just one day in the lab last week(shadowing Elliot and his mentor) before leaving at 5am Tuesday morning until Sunday night. Fourteen of my students competed at the HOSA- Future Health Professionals conference in Orlando, FL with 9,750 students representing 54 states and countries. Our biggest memory was when the US Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Dr. Jerome Adams MD MPH, photo-bombed our group photo!

I am looking ahead to the abstract/poster, because I want to know what happens if our research never gets the question answered.  What if we find a lot about what does not work, and not a lot about what does answer the question?  I mean, I know that trouble-shooting problems in research is part of good science, but is that ok to talk about on our poster?  It is possible (not ideal) that we might spend the whole 6 weeks and not advance as much as we hoped, and not have an answer for our original question.  I just wanted to make sure that it is ok to make our poster highlight the “work in progress” toward a question and not have to be a fully answered question.  And, therefore, since our abstract is due ahead before we know if we have any results, it may be “misleading” to what we eventually find, but we will make it match as best we can.  Does this sound right?

Last week our mentor, Yong, gave us a number of activities to perform on Python. First, I worked to develop a facial recognition program that could track my eyes, then my face in a given photo. The next step was to transition that program from a picture to a video. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time looking at a screen in my life. After nearly 2 full days, I figured out how to use the Video Capture function. Next, I moved on to the next step of using a threshold. Running a threshold means the image is split into two different groups. In my case, the image was reimaged into a gray scale, then again into just black and white. From there, I created another program that used color tracking. I tested this program out on blue items only and then merged the facial recognition software.

In the beginning, I struggled to understand how these smaller steps fit into the big picture. After speaking with Yong about our concerns he helped to bridge the gap and set me on the right track to build my webcam pulse detector. Currently, the pulse detector is non-existent…but I will have an update soon!

The making of a superconductor will take time to allow the bonding of the materials.  Our materials are  Yttrium Oxide, Cooper Oxide, and Barium Carbonate. We weighted and grinded the materials to obtain an homogenous mixture.   After grinding the materials, we compacted them in 10mm pellets  using a press. Once the pellets were pressed; we heated the pellets using a tube furnace. For that, I used Olympus, the nickname of the tube furnace. It may look simple; however it had to be programmed using a ramp. The first 4 hours the temperature would rise from room temperature to 900ºC, then maintain the temperature at 900ºC for 12hours, to finally descend to room temperature in 8 hours; all the time the tube  receives oxygen from a tank to allow the bonding, since the materials would release CO₂ while being heated inside the tube.

The objective is to go from:

                                     Y₂O₃ + 6CuO + 4BaCO₃  → 2YBa₂Cu₃O₇ + 4CO₂

After the process, we XRD the material again, the process needs to be repeated until the materials are completely bonded.  The material changed the color from gray to green during the first process; now it looks almost black/dark gray.

Today, we are going to analyze it again in the XRD to check the diffraction pattern.

So, I’ve hit a bit of a speed bump with my research so far. My PI wants me to use cellulose to form the ceramic pipes for our device. The problem I’ve encountered is that the cellulose is burning and making the whole structure very brittle. I’ve been drying the clay more and using multiple layers, which is yielding better results. However, I’ve yet to  produce a good sample that includes the cellulose. I did make a complete clay pipe to produce a visual of what our sample is supposed to look like.

My mentor wants to take my project in another direction. He thinks focusing on removing the metal content in water would be more feasible in this six weeks as opposed to the anti-microbial approach. I’ve been reading about magnetite and chitosan so that we can talk to Dr. Noveron about shifting the project’s direction.

The following pictures show a meeting, some samples, and a happy accident trying to evaporate some water in the clay using a vacuum oven.