Abstract:
An internship at Eli Lilly is an incredible opportunity to be able to experience. There are thousands of different research projects being conducted at Lilly and I was extremely lucky to get to help with two projects. A clinically annotated tissue databank (CATD) was developed about 10 years ago at Lilly, but it still being perfected. CATD is of great importance to the researchers at Lilly because it enables them to find and obtain the necessary tissues they need for the studies they are conducting. During this study, nearly 4,400 patient specimens were entered into CATD making thousands of new tissues available for research purposes. Microscopic sections from over 650 of these tissues were analyzed for cancer types and imaged for inclusion in the database. Also, the specimens from these patients were organized so they could easily be located once requested in CATD. Another project of great significance researched the amount of data loss when an image file is compressed for computer storage. Storage space on hard drives is limited in many medical research companies, which unfortunately limits the number of images researchers can hold on their hard drives. This could potentially even halt some research from occurring. The compression study evaluated compressing images by creating JPEG and JPEG2000 files in color and black and white. Image analysis included calculating how much data was lost at each compression level. There was a very delicate line as to how far an image can be compressed to save hard drive space without losing important data from the image. Overall, JPEg2000 was more efficient at compressing color images without data loss than JPEG. Using liver tissues stained in the H&E, a 10% data loss at a 150 level of compression was acceptable for continued data analysis. Working at Eli Lilly was an amazing experience that gave me a very realistic view of what a research scientist's daily job would be.
