Nitya Talreja #4 Ovarian Cancer Trials Part 2

The first few weeks into my EXP, Dr. Ramirez decided a change was necessary for the cancer trials to improve. His concern was based upon the issue that the dogs were trained to detect something during each of the 10 trials. There was a malignant blood plasma sample from a person with ovarian cancer in the scent detection wheel at all times. The issue was that it wasn't a very life-like circumstance. Everybody the dog encounters will not have ovarian cancer. We needed to train the dogs for scenarios in which there wasn't something to alert on.

Dr. Ramirez's solution was implementing a blank trial among the 10 normal cancer trials each dog was trained on. The other 9 trials remained the same, but on trial #4, a blank glass container was substituted for the malignant cancer port. This ensured that the dogs would not always find what they were trained to look for ( or in this case sniff for).

These blank trials made the lab environment a bit more stressful than usual. In the middle of the trial, we had to collectively take out the malignant port, clean out the empty port, and put in the blank trial all in the matter of a few minutes as to not make the dogs restless. It took a lot of teamwork but we somehow managed to complete the task without any mistakes.

All three dogs were successful on the blank trial and did not alert on any of the port on the scent detection wheel as they usually would on the malignant port. :)

Since we were changing the course of the trial, a new excel spread sheet was to be made to log in the new data. Dr. Ramirez gave me the honors of making the new spreadsheet. It was a bit challenging to grasp the image Dr. Ramirez had in mind, especially since I had not had much experience with excel nor had a made a spreadsheet of this kind in the past, but I eventually got the hang of it, and towards the end, logging in data came easily to me.



This week Dr. Ramirez also put me in charge of the Environmental Exposure data. Environmental Exposure is recorded on a data sheet that every trainer must have with him/her when taking a dog in a public environment(there was a copyright issue, otherwise I would be able to include the data sheet on the blog). These sheets record a dog's reactivity to object/noise/people around them and they note the specific environment of the dog. For instance, the sheet require the trainer to note whether if there are dogs in the environment or if there are high/low value treats being used, etc. Every time, a trainer had completed a Environmental Exposure sheet, I would be responsible for its entry into the excel spreadsheet. It was not an easy task at first. I had to become accustomed to the specific language used to the spreadsheet. But after I did, it came easily to me. There were some days this week where I would come in and there would be about 30 sheets for me to complete at once, but it wasn't too difficult after I got used to it.

We enforced this new aspect of the cancer trial for about a week before Dr. Ramirez decided it was time for another change. I will learn more about it in the beginning of next week right before I leave. This week was also the start of the new journal club meetings where we discussed the history of scent detection based on the very first paper published on dog scent detection of ovarian carcinomas. We discussed the pros and cons of the trial and how far the scientific community has come since that paper was published. Dr. Otto joined us on the journal club meeting and we had an informative session about the volatilome and the future of scent detection by dogs.