Week 6: Almost at the End

Guy Scuderi

Wow, I cannot believe week six has already come and gone. This experience has been quite remarkable so far. On Monday, I attended several meetings in the cardiothoracic surgery department where the cardiothoracic fellows presented various cases they were faced with over the past week. Although I was only able to understand about half of the terminology that was said during the presentations, it was still very interesting to absorb all this information and learn about these surgeons everyday lives and the substantial complicated cases they are faced with every day of the year. On Tuesday, I went to a three hour didactic presentation on aortic valve pathogenesis and treatment/replacement techniques presented by another cardiothoracic fellow. This was again a very interesting experience as the surgeons went over the variety of procedures that they perform to treat aortic valve diseases, specifically aortic valve calcification. Aortic valve calcification is a degenerative disease in which calcium is deposited on the heart valve over time, which substantially reduces the valve's functionality and in severe cases can lead to aortic valve stenosis, or narrowing of valve and reduction in blood flow (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: Calcified and stenotic aortic valve (taken from image online)

Aortic valve stenosis can be life threatening as the heart must compensate and work harder to push blood through the valve. This is a growing problem as about 1.5 million Americans suffer from aortic stenosis. In these cases, the surgeons must replace the aortic valve with either a biological valve replacement (usually porcine) or mechanical valve. I really enjoyed attending this presentation as I was able to see lots of actual patient pictures of the aortic valve replacements that these surgeons performed and the basic techniques they use to complete these procedures.

Also during this week, I continued to work on my clinical research project. After sifting through all the sources and narrowing it down to exactly 24 articles, I continued with the data extraction from these papers. This week I finished the initial data extraction and was able to perform some basic analysis on the reoperation rates for these procedures. Besides that, I also spent this week helping other research fellows on other side projects they are specifically working on, such as a retrospective study looking at all the cases of cardiac tumor resection at New York Presbyterian over the course of the last two decades, and collecting data for preoperative database on the progression of aortic aneurysm size from patients at New York Presbyterian. As I have stated before, although this work has been very tedious and the majority of the time I spend just "data mining", I have definitely appreciated this clinical research experience as a whole. I now have a much better understanding of how clinical research is conducted firsthand.






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