Week 6 (Daniel)

This week, to help in my project, I went down to the PET facility to see how the PET data was being collected in humans and in rats. This proved to be very helpful as I learned that an additional step was needed for the rat data for the model to work properly. I needed to take concentrations measured in the rat's vena cava (the large vein returning blood to the heart) and convert it into an arterial input function for the model and I found a paper on that exact step.

I have not seen much new for surgeries this week and Dr. Schwartz was not in on Wednesday so I took that time to continue reading "When the Air Hits Your Brain," a collection of stories from neurosurgeons that were critical into shaping how they became who they are in the operating room, focusing on a mix of cases with both good and bad outcomes, that Dr. Schwartz had given to me and several other shadowing students. I am enjoying the book so far and have even been able to relate to some of the cases presented based on my own hospital experience.

At this point, there is only one week left in NYC and still a lot to do. I will try to explore a bit more of the city but focus on getting an initial method established to track the blood-brain barrier permeability as it changes when mannitol is introduced into and removed from the rats in the study.

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