Week 2 - Moni



Week 2 was more productive, since I've started getting clearances to do more lab work. Notably, on Tuesday, the lab spent the day doing mouse surgery to test the efficacy of a new cell line in healing tendon rupture of the rotator cuff. It took our 6 person team 12 hours since we did 10 mouse cages. I was impressed with the tenacity of the scientists in our lab to do this procedure on these incredibly small mouse samples through the entire day. I also got trained on the multiphoton microscope at WCMC, which I will be using in the coming weeks to evaluate tendon degeneration in mouse models. Today I was able obtain surgical discards of tendon samples from Dr. Rodeo's surgeries that I will be using for my studies to investigate mechanobiology of degenerative tissue. I also had the opportunity to meet some engineers from GE, who were designing new MRI coils for patient comfort. It was interesting for me to talk to the engineers and the radiologists to see common problems faced with instrumentation, and the communication and design process between the two groups.

On Thursday I attended a seminar, presented by Dr. Rodeo, about the clinical state biologics in orthopedic treatment, which I found to be very beneficial. As a PhD student, I read many research papers looking at novel applications of biologics, but these are still investigative and used primarily in animal models. The clinician's perspective of personal preferences towards specific treatments, or the efficacy of the treatments in human use, is something that often falls between the cracks in communication between clinicians and researchers.

Outside of lab, I'm still enjoying everything the city has to offer. Since I didn't win Hamilton tickets yet, I went to see Phantom of the Opera instead. I spent some time over the weekend in Brooklyn and had this delicious taco at Smorgasburg, which came with a great view of Manhattan.

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