Zach's Blog

We just finished another set of exams focusing on the cardiovascular system. There was some respiratory and neck anatomy pushed in there too but it looks like that will be the focus of the next three weeks. I don't think I've really explained the format for these exams yet so prepared to be wowed. Every three weeks we have four hours of exams. The class is split into two halves. One half does two hours of a physiology exam while the other half is further split into a histology and anatomy sections. Histology is basically an hour of identifying tissue samples on a computer and answering questions about them. Anatomy is held in the cadaver lab with anatomical structures pinned and questions about their clinical significance. These two groups rotate and then trade off with the physiology group. Physiology is just under two hours covering the last three weeks of material. If you thought it was fun reading about it, just imagine how fun it is to do it. Everyone develops their ow

She loves the swing. I've realized that medical school isn't just about cramming a semester's worth of information in your head over the course of three weeks. It's also about cramming a semester's worth of information in your head over the course of three weeks and still living a balanced life. I'm pretty sure "balanced" isn't the right word though, because it seems somewhat unattainable given the requirements put upon medical students. I've found that having a family makes this all the more noticeable. Everyone love's sleeping on top of mom Over the last three weeks everyone in my family has taken turns being sick. Addie got hand, foot, and mouth disease which completely messed up her already fragile sleeping habits. Poor little Zoey was also sick and may have caught it but was still pretty adorable. Lexi had a sore throat for several days and one day of a really bad fever. She handles it really well but I came home early anyway

This was originally going to be an anatomical picture of the hand focusing on tendons and palmar muscles, but I ran out of time before we moved on to the dorsal aspect of the hand. I probably won't ever finish it, so I decided to just share it as a very amateurish artistic contribution.

Monday : Labor Day! Which means that Lexi tried to clean the house with screaming kids while I finished up as many projects as I could before the semester gets insane with the beginning of the human structure and function class. Basically, I won't be seeing anything but the inside of a book until December. Tuesday : We had a disease scenario training in which we figured out that ice cream was responsible for gastroenteritis following a church picnic in the 1940's. I then spent most of the day studying and spent some time at the park with Addie while Zoey and Lexi went to the store. Wednesday : Took the final exam for mastering medical information and then learned about how to take someone's sexual history. It seems like we spent so much time emphasizing how we shouldn't feel awkward about it because it's necessary that it convinced people that they felt awkward about it. Some of the standardized patient interviews were really interesting because it became mo

The following represents the current extent to which the iClass package I’ve been developing has been tested. The goal is to impliment it in ANTsR eventually when I’m not in the midst of medical school classes. For now this can be used if ANTsR is already installed and the following code is run to download the package from github. ## install.packages("devtools") devtools::install_github("Tokazama/iClass") library(ANTsR) library(h5) home <- '/Volumes/SANDISK/datasets/ucsd/' ucsd <- read.csv(paste(home, 'spreadsheets/ucsdWOna.csv', sep = ""))[, -1] iGroup The first thing I want to do is create an object that represents my image information in a convenient way. I can do this using the iGroup class. The following demonstrates how I do so with whole brain morphometry images. wblist <- c() boolwb <- rep(FALSE, nrow(ucsd)) for (i in 1:nrow(ucsd)) { tmppath <- pas