Week 5: Meta-Analysis Continued
Well, immersion is surely flying bye! We have only two weeks left to enjoy this beautiful city and finish up our research projects. Cannot believe that five weeks have already come and gone. I have already seen so much and am looking forward to finishing up these next two weeks on a strong note before I venture back to Ithaca for the rest of this summer.
This past week I was fully immersed with my meta-analysis project. As I discussed last week, I was working on narrowing down the sources. Last time I wrote this, I had about 100 sources from a total of about 500 that were potential hits. At the beginning of this week, I sifted through all of these sources to pick out ones that definitely met our inclusion criteria of at least 10 patients who have received reoperations on the distal aorta. After completing this painstaking process (which took about two full days), I have narrowed it down to 25 sources. From there, I began to extract useful data from all these papers. The main points of data that I began to extract were the number of patients who were in the study, the initial aortic procedure they underwent, some other demographic information such as the following: 1) do the reoperation patients have Marfan Syndrome or some other connective tissue genetic disorder (this is very useful information because these people are more prone to aortic aneurysms and ruptures due to their mutations in an important connective tissue protein gene (FBN1, or fibrillin-1), 2) do the reoperation patients have a bicuspid aortic valve instead of a normal triscuspid valve? (This is also useful information since these patients have abnormal blood flow/hemodynamics and therefore are susceptible to aortic diseases). I also extracted information about the overall reoperation rates, the type of distal aortic reoperations that these patients underwent, as well as the overall mortality rates. This entire process of extraction took another two days and filled up basically the majority of my work week. Now that all this information is extracted, I will be meeting with my clinical mentor, Dr. Gaudino, early this upcoming week to discuss some necessary next steps of this project. Next week should be filled with more data analysis work instead of just data extraction, which will be much more exciting and less tedious. I am looking forward to starting to put together this information in a way that can then be presented.
Besides my work in the clinical offices, I also continued to shadow a graduate student in Dr. Evan's lab to continue to learn the embryonic stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte differentiation technique. The graduate student has finally optimized her protocol for her particular cell line and therefore I was finally able to see a completely successful differentiation with large clusters of beating cardiomyocytes in culture, which was really interesting. As I have stated in earlier blogs, this technique is very finicky and I had trouble performing the protocol successfully back in Ithaca. After observing the procedure first hand, I think I have finally figured out the small nuances and techniques that will be necessary for me to do this successfully back in my own lab. I am excited to try it myself when I get back in a few weeks now that I know what to look for and how to do it successfully.
That is basically all for now! Stay posted as I finish up this exciting project and observe some more surgeries during the last two weeks of my time here in the big apple!
This past week I was fully immersed with my meta-analysis project. As I discussed last week, I was working on narrowing down the sources. Last time I wrote this, I had about 100 sources from a total of about 500 that were potential hits. At the beginning of this week, I sifted through all of these sources to pick out ones that definitely met our inclusion criteria of at least 10 patients who have received reoperations on the distal aorta. After completing this painstaking process (which took about two full days), I have narrowed it down to 25 sources. From there, I began to extract useful data from all these papers. The main points of data that I began to extract were the number of patients who were in the study, the initial aortic procedure they underwent, some other demographic information such as the following: 1) do the reoperation patients have Marfan Syndrome or some other connective tissue genetic disorder (this is very useful information because these people are more prone to aortic aneurysms and ruptures due to their mutations in an important connective tissue protein gene (FBN1, or fibrillin-1), 2) do the reoperation patients have a bicuspid aortic valve instead of a normal triscuspid valve? (This is also useful information since these patients have abnormal blood flow/hemodynamics and therefore are susceptible to aortic diseases). I also extracted information about the overall reoperation rates, the type of distal aortic reoperations that these patients underwent, as well as the overall mortality rates. This entire process of extraction took another two days and filled up basically the majority of my work week. Now that all this information is extracted, I will be meeting with my clinical mentor, Dr. Gaudino, early this upcoming week to discuss some necessary next steps of this project. Next week should be filled with more data analysis work instead of just data extraction, which will be much more exciting and less tedious. I am looking forward to starting to put together this information in a way that can then be presented.
Besides my work in the clinical offices, I also continued to shadow a graduate student in Dr. Evan's lab to continue to learn the embryonic stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte differentiation technique. The graduate student has finally optimized her protocol for her particular cell line and therefore I was finally able to see a completely successful differentiation with large clusters of beating cardiomyocytes in culture, which was really interesting. As I have stated in earlier blogs, this technique is very finicky and I had trouble performing the protocol successfully back in Ithaca. After observing the procedure first hand, I think I have finally figured out the small nuances and techniques that will be necessary for me to do this successfully back in my own lab. I am excited to try it myself when I get back in a few weeks now that I know what to look for and how to do it successfully.
That is basically all for now! Stay posted as I finish up this exciting project and observe some more surgeries during the last two weeks of my time here in the big apple!
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