For anyone who has doubts about how absolutely perfect the life of a radiologist is... let me be the one to change your minds. I am in the last week of my radiology elective and I can honestly say that it has been a month long party, twice weekly clinics not withstanding. I show up around 8:00 for conference and we take a 1 hour lunch break promptly at 12:00. In the afternoons, we are never there past 4:30. There are no progress notes to write, no HTN meds to titrate, no Furosemide or Abx to adjust.... perfect!

dear diary, my second year resident is a real prick. He doesn't really know anything about cardiology and yet he seems insistent on giving me his opinion on every possible aspect of patient care. If you want my honest opinion, the best thing for patient care would be for him to shut the hell up.

So, I am on the CCU service right now. It is not bad since I only have one patient. I started off the month with 16 which was a nightmare. At any rate, I am just sitting around waiting for something exciting to happen. I am on call today so I don't think I can hold on to the 1 patient service forever. On the up side, I am doing radiology next month which means weekends off. I think I am going to start drinking again next month... it has been a while.

I finally put the final touches on my computer setup in this apartment. The Linux Box (my old laptop attached to a wall mounted flat panel in the living room) is now hardwired to the rest of the network... I am not a particularly big fan of wi-fi and since I already had a RJ-45 running out to the living room, I just daisy-chained another one with a cheapo switch from Comp-USA.
The final integrating step for the setup was activating the ssh server on the linux box and installing X-Win 32 on the beast (desktop) so that I can run and control everything from my bedroom/ desktop. For anyone who has never used an X windows emulator before, they are much easier to use now then they were even a couple of years ago. There is no more setting DISPLAY variable and crap like that... X-Win automatically does that, and it is integrated with PuTTy, which is convenient.

So, I am sitting here in the BMT Unit, and I decided to listen to some music. So, I plugged the speakers to this computer into my PDA and turned the music on... my initial concern was that the music might bother some of the patients, but I quickly learned that whatever residual hearing these guys may have had before they were admitted to this unit... we kill it all off with our chemo.

I have been fiddling around with a program to try and interpret images, and have been met with only marginal luck since I have been trying a brute force and admittedly unsophisticated method. So, I decided that it was time to learn a little bit more about computation theories... in particular, how to make an adaptive program. You see, the main problem that I have been having is that tolerance thresholds for significance vary from one region of an image to another, and I didn't have a way to allow the progam to know when it was on the wrong track. I could get it to pretty accurately figure out what areas represent the majority of the body wall, but after that, the reality of finite resolution hits me square in the face.
Fortunately, I happen to pick up a book on AI theory, which is not nearly as complicated as one might think. A lot of the algorithms are the same as those used in optimization theory, such as simulated annealing and DNA mutation based algorithms. What struck me as brilliant is the way that artificial neural networks are set up. I think the brilliance of them is that the fundamental idea underlying the networks is simple in its concept, regardless of how complicated the final calcuations may turn out to be. First things first though, I need to learn more about the particulars of their implimentation before I start reworking the entire program to incorporate it.
Another topic that I found amazingly useful is fuzzy logic which allows a program to essentially make imprecise decisions based on a given set of inputs in order to compensate for real world variabililty in measurements. I have a feeling that when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of the program, I am going to have to incorporate some of these algorithms into the program as well since most low resolution images have a great deal of background noise that make determining the significance of true signals difficult.

So, I had a day off today... I have been thinking about putting a computer in the living room for a while now, so i finally got around to doing it. Since it a pretty packed room to begin with, I couldn't really have my full linux box in here... also, during my move down here to San Antonio, i managed to bust the screen to my laptop. Logically, I decided to load red hat onto my laptop and just hook it up to a wall mounted flat panel (I got a great deal on an open item 17in HP at best buy). I have to say, I have undertaken a lot of project in my life that haven't turned out so well, but this one is actually turning out exactly like I expected it. If I get around to it I will post a pic of my setup.

Well, I got through my first day of internship without killing anyone, which is good. I am on the bone marrow transplant service, which means that everyone is sick as shit and knockin on heaven's door. Fortunately, I am working at the VA which means that the service is pretty light.
You know, a lot of people have bad things to say about the patients at the VA, but I personally like them... you can actually feel good about helping these people. They are otherwise good people who just had a bad run of luck with their health. It's not like county hospitals where everyone is a drug abusing pregnant homeless alcoholic with no desire to change. Alright, time for bed... till next time.

Well, I got through my first day of internship without killing anyone, which is good. I am on the bone marrow transplant service, which means that everyone is sick as shit and knockin on heaven's door. Fortunately, I am working at the VA which means that the service is pretty light.
You know, a lot of people have bad things to say about the patients at the VA, but I personally like them... you can actually feel good about helping these people. They are otherwise good people who just had a bad run of luck with their health. It's not like county hospitals where everyone is a drug abusing pregnant homeless alcoholic with no desire to change. Alright, time for bed... till next time.

So, I finally graduated from Med School... which is in and of itself scary for the entire human race. I am starting Internship on friday, so I figured I would restart posting here to have a catalog of my Intern year experience. I am in San Antonio for the first year doing prelim medicine. My first rotation is going to be BMT (bone marrow transplant), which is good in the sense that it is a service with a relatively limited scope. Much better than starting on VA wards where shit can hit the fan with any patient that walks in the door.
On a happier note, my sister just had a baby boy last wednesday.... see for yourself. If you don't think that is a cute baby, then you have something seriously wrong with you.

So, last time that I posted was several months ago and I was just starting the interview process for residency in radiology. Today I found out that I did in fact match into a program, but I don't find out which program until Thursday. In the past couple of years Radiology had become one of the most competitive residencies to get into, but for some reason this year there were a bunch of spots that went unfilled. At any rate, I will definitely post again once I find out where I matched.