NYC Chronicles (Week 2): Medicine is a Team Sport

This week at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), I  joined Dr. Prince at his weekly meeting with Dr. Graham Barr, an associate medical professor and a specialist in respiratory epidemiology, and other collaborating members to discuss the use helium-3 diffusion weighted imaging (3He-DWI) to calculate the size of alveoli in patients with emphysema. As I mentioned before in my previous post, DWI is a form of MR imaging that relies on the Brownian motion of protons in tissues to obtain images, displaying intensified regions of restricted proton diffusion, which typically occurs in pathological areas. 3He-DWI can be used as an alternative or a supplement to traditional MR imaging to scan regions of the body with low proton density, such as the lungs, to further characterize the healthy and diseased tissues of patients. By attending this meeting, I noticed that there were subtle differences in problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as diverse preferences in experimental design, data acquisition and analysis between clinicians and scientists. The physicians were more concerned with the direct application of this research to their practice and patient care, while the scientists were more interested in increasing the knowledge and understanding of emphysema and lung pathology. Although this was the case, both perspectives had their strengths in addressing a scientific question and are necessary to influence clinical innovation and drive the field of medical research forward.


Dr. Prince and I also attended the weekly liver transplantation conference hosted by the CUMC Center of Liver Disease and Transplantation surgical team. This forum allows physicians from CUMC and New York Presbyterian Hospital to discuss their equivocal cases with colleagues, fellows, and residents, in order to make an appropriate diagnosis and to determine a suitable treatment plan for their patients. After a week of interpreting MR images of the abdominal and pelvic anatomy with Dr. Prince and CUMC radiology residents, I had an easier time understanding the complexities of each case presented by the physicians and distinguishing the different organs of the body on the MRI and CT scans. As usual, there were many interesting cases presented at this meeting, ranging from less severe conditions, such as jaundice, to more life-threatening diseases, such as hepatic tumor growth and metastasis. Although I am learning so much about different hepatic and renal conditions, and how to use radiology to diagnose patients, I couldn’t help but be invigorated by the collaborative nature that exists between the physicians, which is a critical aspect in medicine. Everyone’s opinion was considered when diagnosing a patient and each person was given the opportunity to present their case, ask questions, interject, and make suggestions on treatment options. As a pre-med graduate student, I was excited to be in the room full of doctors who are so intelligent, personable, and respectful to one another, reassuring my decision to pursue medicine and research as a physician scientist.

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: Prostates & Autopsies

Image
This was a fun and interesting week! The prostate biopsy chip slides from last week were evaluated, and more testing was done. On Wednesday and Thursday, two people from the company were here to do some trials with the new chips. This time, real prostate biopsies were taken, and sections were used to evaluate the quality of the tissue. Each chip holds up to 6 biopsies inside the little grooves. The color of the dividers (blue, yellow, and black) orient each sample to distinguish where in the prostate each biopsy came from. It also allows six biopsy cores to be placed on one slide which saves space and resources [1]: Instead of all 12 of the slides on the left (although that is a little excessive), you just need two with the BxChip. It also seems to keep the cores flat and aligned. This is what a magnified core might look like [2]: The tissue fits right inside the little grooves (although it can be slightly difficult to get them in there), and then the whole chip can be ...
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. ...
Read more