Friday! Today, Dr. Laber’s daily stats lesson consisted of the math behind precision medicine. It was, by far, the most complicated lesson Suki and I have ever received in our lives. He went over insanely convoluted functions for sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs) for max efficiency of data. These included Q functions (a type of trial) of the three variables {(Xi, Ai, Yi)} for certain patient characteristics that would in theory spit out the proper treatment using digits of {-1, 1} – I know, not the most intuitive of equations. Before we knew it, Dr. Laber had moved on to linear regression-based estimations like this one:
He also tied in a bit of calculus, which was thankfully something I could understand, when looking at optimal regimes (best treatment flow-path for a patient). His lessons have proven to be both interesting and wildly terrifying, especially since Suki and I are the only ones in the audience. The second part of the day was composed of working on an augmented reality (AR) 3D imaging project with Lisa, the graphic designer. AR is a special type of animation that uses real-time images, such as a video feed from a camera, and placing animated objects on top of it in the virtual world. She had us create animations using the engine Unity that would be triggered by the camera recognizing a certain object- a card with our names on it. Three hours later, we had a (somewhat) functional model in place; mine included the letters of my name peeling off the page while trees grew and shrank in the background and food spinning circles in the bottom right corner. While it was fun trying my hand at 3D animation, the navigation of so many windows and the difficulty of the program overall showed me how I could never be an animator. That stuff must be HARD. All in all, I’d say it was a successful first week at Laber Labs, and amongst all the unintelligible codes and graphs, it’s been a good time.
