Brent Armistead

This is me :)

Hello all!

Welcome to my first blog post! I will quickly go over a little bit about who I am, my interests, and my Senior Project: Seeing Eye to i, Using the iStent to Combat Glaucoma.

I am a senior at BASIS Scottsdale, a very math-and-science-focused school. I have taken many Biology, Chemistry, and Physics classes, and these are the ones that interest me greatly. Also, Psychology has been another interesting class, and I plan to major in it (though I am young and my mind will probably change). I always have loved studying people, just testing people’s reactions and always trying to understand their motives. With the Psychology class, it gives me the official terms for the trends and behaviors that I have observed throughout my life.

Outside of school, my favorite hobbies are basketball, karate, and sleeping. Last year, I joined the Varsity Basketball team (I am now the starting center), and it has been a blast ever since. 

I'm working on dunking like this though that will take a while

Karate has always been a passion, and I now pass on my knowledge to the little ones by teaching the Youth and Little Warriors classes at my karate studio. Sleeping is just wonderful. We all know this.

 

I wish this was me

As for my project, it is a continuation of ophthalmic research. My project has been going on since the summer before my junior year, so around two years. I am working with Dr. Yuri McKee at Swagel-Wooton-Hiatt Eye Center to test if a new device can cure Glaucoma. This device is called the iStent, and it is implanted in the eye during cataract surgery to act as an artificial drain. Since Glaucoma is an unhealthy level of intraocular pressure, the iStent helps to tackle this issue head on, hopefully giving us a cure to the largest cause of blindness. A unique aspect of this study is that we are comparing the iStent to a common Glaucoma surgery, the Selective Laser Trabeculoplasty (which is a mouthful, so we will call it SLT for short).

My role in this study, knowing that I cannot perform the surgeries, is data analysis and statistics. With guidance from Dr. McKee, I will compile all the data points, ranging from intraocular pressure before and after the surgery, number of medications used before and after, and best-corrected visual acuity before and after. After that, I will put all this data into a handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet and run some basic statistical analyses on it. With this information, and some pretty graphs, we can then deduce if the iStent truly works, and how it compares to the SLT, while also accounting for the effect of both surgeries on one eye.

I hope you are as excited as I am to learn about the iStent, and I hope you come back each week to see how its all going!

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My Senior Project Proposal: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3j4J67eOP7zbWFtMnpRQmlWN0U/view?usp=sharing

Site Website: http://www.swhec.com