Week 7

For my last week in the OR, I observed a procedure that was the first of its kind in the country. In this case, the patient had previously received a sternum resection due to cancer. Although an implant was placed in place of the missing sternum, it needed to be replaced. To this end, the physicians on the case called for a custom designed 3D printed titanium implant to replace the sternum. This implant was created using CT scans of the patient’s own anatomy, ensuring that this artificial sternum would be tailored to the patient and fit perfectly. The surgery itself involved cutting through the chest wall and removing the previous implant. After removing some of the soft tissue on the rib cage, the implant was fit into place and securely screwed in. Dr. Spector’s part of the surgery was to reconstruct the chest wall by bringing muscle flaps over the implant.

In the research front, we have made multiple technical adjustments to the SMF platform to bring us closer to being able to reliably perform diffusion studies. For example, 3D printed templates are used to generate SMF constructs with consistent dimensions. Small issues still exist with the platform, but I will be staying in touch with Dr. Spector’s research group to sort these out and assist in data analysis.


Spending a significant amount of time in the OR allowed me to observe the concepts of tissue engineering put into practice, such as in the use of tissue grafts. Seeing patients has also added tangibility to the goal of our research; to help improve and save lives. I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Spector for allowing me to spend the majority of my time here meeting patients and observing surgeries. At the end of our time of being immersed, I can confidently say that my clinical experiences have broadened my perception and understanding of how biomedical engineering research fits into the real world.

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