Drexel REThink Program 2015, Day 1

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Today was my first day of the Drexel REThink Program, offered by the Computer Science department of Drexel University. This program focuses on putting teachers in computer science laboratories to complete summer research, and infusing that summer research into our practice as a teacher in the classroom. The project I will be working on is based on Histology Project, which was my first choice. The description was:

Histology Image Analysis for Diagnosing Breast Cancer:
During this project, you’ll contribute to the development of diagnosing breast cancer through automated methods. Researchers have already created algorithms that analyze images to assess the stage and severity of the breast tumors. You will develop and apply software that extracts new geometric features from high resolution histology images and utilizes these features to predict medical attributes of a breast tumor.

We spent the first half of the day doing the typical introductory things, getting to know people. We then had an encoding puzzle (pictured above), to send an encoded message to another group and decipher their message. It was based on the .gif encoding scheme of pixels.

We then had a delicious lunch (pizza/salad/AMAZING wraps)…and I have no idea where they are from. I met Kathy, who is the partner I will be working with on the projects for the summer.

Kathy and I met with Dr. Mark Zarella, and heard more about our projects. Kathy was a part of this program last year, so she has experience with this laboratory and MATLAB, the program we will be using. Kathy will be working on coding the use of an eye tracker to follow pathologists eyes. The pathologists will be of varying types (1st year med, 2nd year med, junior pathologists and senior pathologists). This will allow better training of pathologists, because there may be a pattern that more senior pathologists use to determine whether someone has cancer. Ultimately, this pattern can be transcribed into machine learning to allow a machine to make this determination.

We then debriefed with the other groups at the end of the day to hear about everyone else’s projects. They are very interesting, and I’ll try to link you to their blogs as soon as I see them.

Tomorrow is the ISTE 2015 Conference!