Week 2: Cut short by illness :(

My second week in New York began with observing a lot of interesting work, and took an unfortunate turn as I came down with a bit of illness around Wednesday afternoon.

On Monday, I had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Vivek Mittal’s group and discuss how they were working in parallel with Dr. Vahdat’s clinical trials to study the effects of copper depletion on the pre-metastatic niche in breast cancer.  This was complemented by my shadowing of Dr. Vahdat on Wednesday where we met with a number of patients who were still in progress as part of this trial.  Alongside Dr Vahdat, I have found it very interesting how decisions are made regarding the selection of treatment options over the course of cancer therapy.  Similar to my experiences last week, I was consistently impressed by how well the patients had researched their treatment options and were able to discuss the crucial factors of treatments, such as side effects and duration of treatment, that I was not keenly familiar with.

 On Tuesday, I observed a surgery performed by Dr Kutler and Dr Spector on a 90 year old patient with a large tumor underneath his ear.  While I was at once surprised by how extensive this surgery was on a 90 year old patient, it was also incredible to see how much reconstruction could be successfully performed on a patient to return the tissue exterior to a “healthy” looking state.

Unfortunately, to limit my further learning in the clinic and exploration of NYC outside of working hours, I came down with some kind of flu-like illness on Wednesday afternoon that left me bedridden until I got up to write this blog post a couple of hours ago.  Hopefully I will be fully recovered by Monday so I can continue to see more of all of this exciting work in the clinic.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week7

With the end of our summer immersion approaching, I feel sad to say goodbye to all the persons I've met in the hospital during this summer. The past 7 weeks has been very fulfilling and exciting to me, and I will never forget my experience here. As a student will electrical engineering background, I never thought that I can be able to go to a real operation room in the hospital and observe doctors operating on surgeries. But in the past 7 weeks, I was able to go to OR every week, and there's always surgery techniques that are impressing to me. Beside clinical experience, I also had a research project, automatic segmentation of zebra fish neuron images. As I have presented in my previous bloggers, for my project, I have tried several different algorithms. The first is simple thresholding. It is usually used as a preprocessing step in image analysis. The second method is watershed algorithm. It works pretty well, but, it's very sensitive to noise, resulting in over segmenta
Read more

Week 5: Spine Surgeries and Excel Files

Image
On the context of my clinical research project, I continue extracting the different demographic and skeletal specific factors for the patients of our study. I was also able to attend an additional spinal fusion surgery under the supervision of Dr. Kim at HSS. During this week, I was particularly interested in the surgical equipment that he uses for the procedure. Dr. Kim uses the Zimmer Biomet Vitality Spinal Fixation System for his spine surgeries. The components of the system are made from medical grade titanium alloy and medical grade cobalt chromium alloy. In summary, these were the main steps of the process for installing the screws into the patient spine which, personally, was the most interesting part of the procedure.  Initially, the pedicle area of the vertebrae is localized, and an insertion is made in the cortical shell. Then, a probe, included with the system, creates a pathway for the polyaxial pedicle screw to be inserted into the pedicle and the vertebral body. It i
Read more

Week 6 (Jason Chang)

Image
With only a week of immersion left, I have been focusing all my time on developing a preliminary proof-of-concept protocol for automating EEG artifact removal in MATLAB. Admittedly, it has been very challenging at times, especially given my limited neurology and programming experience, but I have made significant progress as of recently with the assistance of Dr. Mangat and Dr. Forgács. Last week, I began using EEGLAB, an interactive EEG analysis toolbox in MATLAB, to perform independent component analysis (ICA) on selected datasets from the subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) study. After ICA is applied, EEGLAB has different built-in signals processing functions to mark and remove components containing any artifacts. With several methods to choose from, I consulted with Dr. Forgács on Thursday to seek his clinical expertise. Figure 1 . Individual component analysis (ICA) to reject artifacts by visual inspection of continuous EEG signals  Figure 2. Removing ICA components using
Read more