Hey everyone, I hope you all started your weeks off well. I have to admit, I do not have a whole lot to say about this week. I went through more patient charts and collected more information about each patients medical history and their hospital complications after surgery. I was planning on analyzing the data on Friday to share in blog post, but unfortunately, I was not feeling well that day and did not go to my internship.

But, I do want to talk about the direction my project is going. Initially, I mentioned in my proposal that my project would consist of aiding orthopedic researchers in developing an algorithm that would help doctors across the nation diagnose a TKA infection. My role has been collecting data, and inputing it into an excel sheet, so the researchers can use this information when developing an algorithm. I was under the impression this project would take a couple of months of collecting data, and then they would start working on an algorithm, but my on-site mentor informed me that they will be collecting data for a much longer period that a couple months. Since I do not know how to develop an algorithm myself, I will taking a different approach at analyzing this data myself. I will be using the data for two different reasons: first, I will use each patients medical history to see if certain diseases may increase a persons chance of developing an infection. For example, in last weeks blog post, I mentioned that based off the data I collected, patients with diabetes and/or hypertension were more likely to get an infection. Secondly, I will be using the hospital complications of each patient to see how often certain post-operative complications occurred in patients. Hopefully, there are certain complications happen more often and would be a greater indicator of infection. 

Thats all I have for today, but hopefully I will be able to share more trends later this week. See you on the next blog post!