Learning To Be A Researcher

Hello guys, I'm back again after more than a month. It has been really busy months for me. Since I started my PhD I can hardly breath. In fact, it feels like everyday is like another day but with the same hope. For those of you who don't know when I started my PhD, it was June 2012 and it's October now which basically means it has been 1 year 4 months. If someone asked me how does it feels being a researcher I would answer like a shit! yeah I mean it. Nothing to be proud of being a PhD student. My life is surrounded with data, complex mathematics equations, other researchers' updates which I'm not sure whether I want to know about it or not, full of worries because I'm so keen to finish this project in 3 years (1 or 2 months extension is okay) and another one is my life is full of questions which I think nobody can answer them. First of all, my CMBE conference paper in Hong Kong has been accepted and I have applied for a travel funding from BMVA but not sure if I will get it or not. I do hope to get it so my I could save a lot of money on my expenses this year. Otherwise I will be in trouble because I don't really want to use my own money for most of the expenses. It will be very expensive. Perhaps it will cost more more than £800 and that is not included my flight going back home in Sabah. The total estimation cost might be about £1300 but the the extra a few hundreds pounds I will use the department's travel funding, some from my supervisor maybe, etc. If I can go to Hong Kong in December, then I will be going back to Sabah as well. This means, I will be celebrating Christmas in a warm weather. Maybe a little bit unusual because most of the people in my country associate that special day with snow LOL! But that is a typical thinking of the people back in Sabah (too much western influence).

I have recently submitted a paper to France as well but the acceptance of notification will on the in the middle of December. I think based on the four papers I have written so far, the fourth paper would be my best. Therefore, I am pretty confident this paper has a good chance to be accepted. But I'm not holding my breath because the result might be completely the opposite. At the moment, I am developing another method which is the third method of detecting prostate abnormality within the peripheral zone. This time I am trying to exploit the dark regions by using histogram analysis techniques. The basic idea behind this method is, making comparison of the low intensity values between the left and right peripheral zone. By using certain matrices, if the difference is more than certain threshold values then we assume that abnormality appears within the prostate. Up to now, the accuracy for this third method only 75.7% and I'm aiming to achieve  more than 80%. I actually put a higher target this time which is 85% but to increase 10% is actually incredibly hard. But I am trying very hard to achieve it. I can actually see a very good prospect of this method if I can find one more feature which can distinguish those left and right peripheral zone. But usually the one last feature which basically means the last indicator is the most difficult part in research. I am so keen to find it out and hopefully before the end of this year I can write another paper to be published. I know it's not easy and it will be bloody difficult but I will keep doing it till I have the answer. On the other hand, I am planning to add more data which basically means I will be testing the method with more than 100 slices. At the moment I am using 70 slices and based on this data set the result shows a good potential.

Now when good results achieved, we should be talking about conferences. Which one shall I go? A top conference but the topics are very general or a lower ranking conference but the topics are very specific. My supervisor advised to submit into a conference which is less popular conference but the topics are very specific. At the moment I have two in my mind. The fist one is ICPR and the second one is ICBES. ICPR is highly ranking whereas ICBES is a new conference but the second one only accept papers within the biomedical engineering field. The fact is, if you going to submit a paper into a more general conference you would end up attending a presentation which is not within your field. I would say just wasting your time attending the conference especially after your presentation. Secondly, most researchers if they are looking for citations or references they tend to search for  conference proceedings which are specifically within their fields. But I will be having a meeting with my supervisor on Monday and hopefully he can give me his best suggestion. It's either Sweden or Prague. Oh yeah! I'm feeling excited now :-) I honestly don't mind which one but I must say Sweden will be cold and Prague will be warm. Therefore, I will be choosing Prague LOL!

Okay, that's some of my updates today. It's Saturday and I am in the office running my experiments hoping to get some good results. Slurping my mocha (my favorite drink). Life is getting exciting but I can feel that my soul and body is wearing out and I'm not sure how long can keep it up but I know that I will be there. I still haven't found my 'torch light' to light my way up in the middle of my research world but at least I have a wooden stick help me out one step ahead.