Jenai Brown McGavock High School Chemistry Teacher

Edwin Donnelly and Ronald Price – Medical Imaging Lab

This summer I worked with Dr. Donnelly mostly and also with Dr. Price.  I made several phantom images for the purpose of edge enhancement effects.  The design of the research is to see if is possible to edge where a tumor ends and where the actual tissue of the effected area begins.  Currently, in mammography, doctors may take out too much tissue in ensuring that all traces of the tumor or tumors have been removed.  This happens because it is not very clear on an x-ray where actual one stops and the other begins.  If this edge enhancement works it will be very vital in the area of breast cancer and mammography. I worked this summer and designed several phantom images to define what image would be the best.  We began by making the images out of resin.  The resin was poured in a mold that would best be x-rayed by the faxitron machine. Next, we drilled three small holes and inch long in the resin.  We filled one hole with water, one with baby oil to represent fat, and the other was left as air and imaged the resin tube. I brought in a fish to be imaged that got great results and lead to ways the software program designed by Dr. Donnelly could be improved.  Much of the time was spent calibrating the machine by hand.  Dr. Price invited us to attend a lecture that was very informative about tumors formed by various factors. I learned from this lecture that Down syndrome children only have ever had two forms of tumors that can form cancer but very rarely have encounters with cancer. We also observed research that Dr. Holt was working on.  She was doing a study on rats and growing bone from coral found in the sea.  It was neat watching her med students image and gas the rats.

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