Week 1: Summer Immersion 2017

The first week of  the summer immersion program has passed, leaving a lot of inspiring influence on me. Last a few days, I have been observing Dr. John G. Kennedy and his fellow Dr. Yoshiharu Shimozono examine patients before and after surgery. Dr. John G. Kennedy specializes in osteochondral and achilles tendon injuries including ankle instability and ligament reconstruction, especially sports-related injuries.

Every day, I started a day with having a meeting at 7 AM, which is one of the characteristics in clinical fields. During the meetings, current/new surgical procedures or X-ray/MRI results of patients were discussed. After the meeting, I followed Drs. Kennedy and Shimozono all day, so I was able to have many chances to learn about how to analyze MRI and decide which treatment can be performed. Furthermore, considering his long experience in the clinical field, it is not surprising that he is really good at communicating with his patients and making them feel safe by explaining surgical procedures and outcomes easy enough to understand. This makes me think about what "professional" means.
http://www.physiozone.com/shockwave/
Among diverse treatment, extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT), which is initially used to remove kidney stone, was often used, approximately a half of cases, due to its powerful effect, such as breaking down the debris of soft tissues causing pain to patients and enhancing regeneration of cartilage by stimulating stem cells or chondrocytes to release beneficial biological molecules. I believe that this new observation would give me some ideas later when designing or developing a new project later.
http://etfaonline.com/foot-anatomy/
Meantime, Dr. Shimozono taught me the overall foot anatomy and main causes and their consequences of ankle related injuries, which helped me a lot understand clinical terminology.

After the clinical schedule, I have looked over several papers related to 3D bioprinting technology to evaluate the possibility of fabricating a tissue engineered construct to treat ankle cartilage legion, which will be the research project at HSS.

The first week of the immersion program already gave me opportunities to learn new things which are not readily obtained in the academic field. I am very looking forward to following weeks that will broaden my horizon.

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