January 24 - The UCI, Microscope Images and BME Roots

Today was our last full day in Uganda. We started the day off with heading over to the Uganda Cancer Institute where we briefly met with Dr. Noleb Mugisha. Dr. Mugisha is leading the effort with Uganda's Comprehensive Community Cancer Program (CCCP) and is penning Uganda's National Cancer Control Plan - the document that sets the framework for the country's strategy to manage cancer. Dr. Mugisha is also involved in developing the Breast Health Guidelines (BHG) for the country. Our meeting was short as there was an imminent audit scheduled for right after we left! But we got a chance to share our work and findings and made plans to meet via Zoom at a later time to better understand the initiatives Dr. Mugisha is working on and how our thoughts fit in with the country's overall cancer strategy.

After meeting with Dr. Mugisha, we walked over to Mulago Hospital again to see Dr. Sam Kalungi and some of his colleagues. We wanted to see if the MiScope® (MISC) portable digital microscope we brought with us would provide the magnification necessary to take an image of a cytology slide to the resolution required for a pathologist to interpret. We tested different backgrounds, lighting, and stabilization methods. Unfortunately, we found that we were about 10x short of what we needed for true visualization of the nucleus, which is the important part when making analyzing cytology.

From there, we walked to Makerere School of Public Health where we met up with Dr. Lukande once again. He walked us to the pathology wing and we spent some time checking the suitability of the MiScope® once again, with the same outcomes. We got to understand the intricacies of photographing images through the eyepiece of a microscope from Dr. Lukande, who has been capturing such images for many years using his phone's camera. We said goodbye to Dr. Lukande as it would be the last time we would see him on this trip.

Instead of driving to our next meeting across the city (which had very backed up roads due to some traffic related to government officials moving around in the city), we opted to meet with Dr. Moses Galukande via a WhatsApp videocall. We had interacted with Dr. Moses since we were back in the states - introduced by one of our advisors at Hopkins. We were confronted with one of the afternoon showers that we had become accustomed to, but still caught us by surprise. As we moved to find shelter from the rain, we shared our insights with Dr. Galukande were able to validate assumptions and receive his input on our findings and plan to solve some of these challenges.

Our last meeting of the day and of our trip was with Dr. Robert Ssekitoleko, the head of the BME department at Makerere University. It felt like a meaningful way to wrap up the trip: in Makerere's analog to our own department at Johns Hopkins. We were joined by the other Johns Hopkins team that is working in Uganda, but on malaria vector control and got to ask Dr. Robert all the medical device and regulatory questions we had. It turned out that he knows our own program director, Dr. Yazdi!

Sunny from the VectorCam team demonstrating the product to Dr. Robert and biomedical engineers Dan, Paula, and Douglas

We ended our day with walking over to the Design Cube with our friends and fellow bioengineering students. The Design Cube is an outfitted shipping container that very much resembles the Johns Hopkins University BME department's design studio!