After learning what it’s like to shadow two Secretaries in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit, I was blown away by the level of care provided as they remained calm under pressure. Friday brought even more fun as they leveled up on me by offering the opportunity to shadow an EEG Tech. The EEG Tech provided the foundation for what it’s like to conduct EEG brain scans for physicians in terms of brain activity. I startling fact I learned during the process is that EEG’s provides information in terms of possible brain seizures. Did you know the brain could experience seizures without the body showing signs of physical movement? I didn’t. This certainly was an opportunity to explore neurophysiology and neuroanatomy in terms of the occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes while also learning how EEG scans can also track eye movement and a heart pulse. Afterwards, I was able to reflect on the possible types of data available to Data Scientists to find patterns from EEG scans to provide suggestions using predictive analytics.
The analysis would provide the possibility of preparing for early interventions informing clinicians and/or families on how to mentally adjust to changes in behavior from the patient. Listening to a video by Health Catalyst titled Predicting the Future of Predictive Analytics in Healthcare - HAS Session 23 is a good introduction if you’re unfamiliar with the predictive analysis concept. I’m currently teaching myself data cleansing in which Health Catalyst refers to it as “feature engineering” which means to remove missing values or to format specific data types in order to perform functions on the data in a uniform way. A great programming language and tool I’ve found is SQLite3 in which I didn’t know the language even has its own core functions for manipulating data such as dates. I’m practicing data analytics using a practice set for predicting mortality rates in health care. I’m having tons of fun and will be sure to keep you all posted on the success.
