Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Despite my on-site mentor going on her daughter's Spring Break this week, Dr. Chong still found some fun things for me to do this week. She asked one of her other interns, Ph.D. student Gina Dumkrieger, to have me help out in the making of a program to score the COMPASS 31, a new and improved version of the ASP (Autonomic Symptom Profile) and the COMPASS (Composite Autonomic Symptom Score). Because I only worked on the program this week, I'll try my best to describe what I was doing.
Originally, the ASP was a 169-item instrument for measuring autonomic symptoms. From it, they generated the COMPASS, an 84-item questionnaire. Sadly not everyone has the time to answer 253 questions. Plus, problems such as an overcomplicated computer analysis process and redundant questions had arisen. Enter the COMPASS 31, a 31-item questionnaire that applies a much simpler scoring algorithm, thereby suitable for widespread use in autonomic research and practice. The questions were split into 7 different domains: Orthostatic Intolerance (questions 1-4), Vasomotor (5-7), Secretomotor (8-11), Gastrointestinal (12-23), Bladder (24-26), and Pupillomotor (27-31). I'm not sure if I explained that well, but check out this article, COMPASS 31: A Refined and Abbreviated Composite Autonomic Symptom Score, for more information.
Since the days Gina and I come into Mayo don't overlap, we have mainly been communicating via email. My job was to type the questions from the questionnaire into the program in addition to finishing the coding for the questionnaire. Below are the first eight questions from the COMPASS 31 input into a program called Macros. I don't know the details about this program, but it's something in Excel. Then the second picture is the code behind the questionnaire.
I've never really coded anything except for a little in Linear Algebra, though I didn't really know what was going on there either. I'll try to explain this to the best of my amateur coding abilities. For each question, each answer has a different value. So depending on the answer a subject chooses makes up the score of the questionnaire. Someone else came up with the equation as well as the value that each answer has, so I only had to copy and paste the equation for each question then put the value of each answer. And here's the final result! The table underneath it is a spreadsheet where all the data will go once patients complete the questionnaire.
That's all for this week! I appreciate your support and all your lovely comments. I'm hoping in the next few weeks that we'll begin data analysis so that I can continue making progress with my project. I'm also still in need of a final product, so any ideas are welcomed. ;D I'll see you next time for Week 7!! :)
