Author: zachc787

Today, I finished designing the program to design and save images of patients’ CBC & BMP values. I decided to add several lines of code to my program that would decide that if cells had missing values, to add “N/A” to the image rather than a blank line of text. By doing so, I was able to stop the ‘hanging’ of the code and was able to allow for the code to run in full force. Afterwards, I began editing my code that would calculate patients’ WC values so that it would also calculate their HC values as well.

I do not feel comfortable posting any images as the data that we were working with is confidential and from REAL people; therefore, I am not able to disclose this information.

Today, I worked more on creating images that would assist doctors in reading on their patients’ CBC and BMP values. In doing so, I learned how to create images that can be saved to the computer using python. My code scaled the text to the space that was available to be used. I still did not manage to finish programming the image creator because at this point, my code began to ‘hang’ at areas with missing values, preventing the rest of the code from executing.

I do not feel comfortable posting any images as I have been working with confidential information and am not able to disclose said information to the public.

Today we worked from home once again, for the same reason as yesterday. I spent most of the day working on a program that would create a PNG file that would display information on the patient’s CBC values so that it would be easier for people to understand what was being written because it is the shorthand way Clinicians report them. I’m currently becoming more versed in the way Clinicians report things and how to make python create images and then save them to the computer with a file name. It is somewhat similar to the programming languages that I am already familiar with, C++ and Java and so it has been somewhat easy for me to become well versed in the language.

Below is an example of what the PNG file would display, with the abbreviations replaced with various different numbers that the abbreviations represent:

Today we worked from home because Dr. Walker was busy with helping his mom. I spent the entire day working on using the equations we collected for calculating girth and designing a program that would calculate every patient’s girth and input the estimated girth calculation into their file. By the end of the day, I managed to finish the calculations ignoring the person’s ethnicity. Once we add ethnicity to the files, I will go back and edit the calculation to include ethnicity in the code. I tested the program and it appears to work perfectly well, I am excited to see the results when we use it with all of the patient data.

 

Snippet of code used:
#Returns the number of the specified column, “name”
def getColNum(name):
i = 0
while(name != sheet.cell(0, i).value):
i = i+1
return i

#Returns the row of the specified participant
def getRowNum(ID):
i = 0
while(ID != sheet.cell(i, getColNum(‘Participant ID’)).value):
i = i+1
return i

#Returns BMI of specified participant
def getBMI(ID):
return sheet.cell(getRowNum(ID), getColNum(‘BMI’)).value

#Returns WC of specified participant
def getWC(ID):
return sheet.cell(getRowNum(ID), getColNum(‘Waist (cm)’)).value

#Returns gender of specified participant
def getSex(ID):
return sheet.cell(getRowNum(ID), getColNum(‘Gender’)).value

#Returns age of specified participant
def getAge(ID):
return sheet.cell(getRowNum(ID), getColNum(‘Age (yr)’)).value

Today, I sat in on a meeting and was able to assist in giving input. We were determining how to decide the “degree of badness” for different problems. This is because currently, how bad problems such as diabetes are is on a stepwise scale: if you have a rating of 20.0, you’re on the very high side of normal, but if you go to 20.1, you’re terrible. We are trying to determine what the best way of measuring how bad a problem is without it being a stepwise function. After the meeting, I continued working on the girth calculation equation and programming a way to input all girth calculations into our stat sheet with every person in it.

Once again, for privacy reasons, I am refraining from sharing any photos as we have been working with data from real human beings.

Today we worked on familiarizing ourselves with exactly what we were going to be doing. My current job is to determine how to calculate girth given a person’s BMI so that we can fill in missing data. I was given a research paper to assist in determining what is required to calculate a person’s girth. Currently, I have identified that a person’s sex, ethnicity, BMI, and age have an effect on the waist circumference; however, it appears as though my numbers are consistently higher than the actual values, potentially indicating that APOE-e4 has some kind of effect on a person’s girth, making it smaller than the normal person. More values need to be tested to make a more conclusive decision.

Due to privacy rights, I don’t have anything that I am legally able to share at the moment in terms of images because we have been working, for the most part, solely with data from real humans.