R25 Thalamus Project Summer ’23

Interns will create labels for multiple subjects across multiple timepoints and contribute to a longitudinal analysis of data acquired in control subjects and patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and AD pathology. These labels, or segmentations, will also serve to teach interns about responsible experimental design as they’ll be blinded to patient IDs, clinical diagnosis, and timepoint order. By producing labels for multiple timepoints across different subjects, interns will learn the variance of human neuroanatomy while also contributing to a robust dataset that will later be analyzed for group effects and label reliability. We anticipate that the complete set of manual labeling of longitudinal images will spur methods development in fields such as Deep Learning for the purpose of more sensitive detection of disease effects, and in fact we look forward to carrying out research in this domain ourselves as the project progresses and the set of manually labeled structures grows.

Lastly, in the final weeks of the internship, students will participate in analyzing and publishing a description of the dataset they produced over the summer. In preparation for this, interns will attend introductory lectures on scientific writing to usher them into the publication phase of the research project and more generally, the scientific process. Using a cross-over learning approach, each student will identify an article pertaining to the current literature of the designated structure for that year and contribute to the background and introduction section of the publication. As stated previously, students will also engage in the analysis portion of the project by producing descriptive statistics of the dataset and learning to properly format the graphs and figures to be included in the paper. This provides an integrated experience of generating a dataset and then analyzing the data to identify effects present in the data that are reflective of the population at large. In doing so, interns will gain an understanding of APA manuscript formatting, Excel spreadsheet analyses, and MATLAB computational software. It is our priority that students will actively participate in the writing aspect of the research project and begin to familiarize themselves with a scientific paper’s appropriate structure and composition.

Past Interns

• Priyanka Onta Prospect Hill Academy Charter School’ 24
• Troy Miller
• Adam Willis Cambridge Rindge and Latin School ‘24
• Stephanie Lin KIPP Academy Lynn Collegiate’25
• Keilana Godhwani Winsor School’24
• Hannah Selverian Pingree School’24
• Aaron Carrington Catholic Memorial High School ’23
• Shyla Charles Ayer Shirley Regional High School ’25
• Jazmin Rodriguez Abott Academy ’25
• Tenzin Dhoundup Cambridge Rindge and Latin School ‘23
• Aman Nehela Cambridge Rindge and Latin School ‘24
• Rayana Mohamed Farah Cambridge Rindge and Latin School ’25
• Nakayla Royal Tech Boston Academy’24
• Kyle Douglas Medford Vocational Technical High School’24
• Brianna Amado Cambridge Rindge and Latin School ’25