Week 7 (Jason Chang)

As my immersion experience comes to an end, I am extremely grateful to have spent this summer with the rising second-year PhD students in NYC. The early mornings spent observing Neuroscience ICU rounds provided me with invaluable clinical exposure to patient care while learning directly from world-class neurocritical care fellows and attendings. Outside of the Neuroscience ICU, I shadowed surgeries, attended hospital seminars, and talked with various physicians about their research. These opportunities have drastically changed my perception of clinical research and physicians. After seeing the day-to-day activities that Dr. Mangat and other individuals undertake in addition to their research and patients, I now have a much greater appreciation for those who dedicate their lives to work in this field.

With only 7 weeks to define and conduct a project, it was difficult not being overly critical of myself whenever my code was not working properly. Despite all the roadblocks and unforeseen circumstances thrown my way, I made a significant amount of progress developing a proof-of-concept protocol with potential real-world applications. Now that my NYC experience is over, I am excited to start a new chapter going into my first year as PhD student at Cornell University.  

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