Week 7: Last week in Surgical Pathology

These seven weeks of immersion have come and gone so quickly! As distant as I am from truly understanding pathology, I was able to get the fundamental ideas, and I loved learning new things every day! This has been an amazing opportunity to experience the clinical world in a very unique way.

When I started, I was completely unfamiliar with pathology, but now I know a lot more. It was great to learn some anatomy, and I enjoyed seeing the process of diagnosis. Everything was new and exciting, but the main take-away was the understanding of how physicians interact and communicate. This immersion program has shown me what is important to physicians, and has provided a different perspective for requirements of good medical innovation. I also had no idea what medical school was like or what residency was until I met the twenty-some pathology residents here, so I gained a better idea of their training and careers as well.

This week (the last week of immersionL), I got to see two more autopsies. I find the whole concept incredible. The pathologists have access to parts of the body that would be extremely difficult to get to if the patient were still alive. An autopsy can make a diagnosis more clear, although I did learn that the cause of death still might not be as clear-cut as they hoped. In reality, autopsy is a fairly long, difficult, and slightly disgusting but extremely valuable process. I’m really glad I got to see a few different cases, but I think that’s all I need on this front. My favorite part of these autopsies was the bone saw. It looks like this:


I thought this was an ingenious piece of technology because it is designed to only cut through bone and not soft tissue, so it prevents accidental incisions of the organs in the body, and it protects the autopsy technician from cuts when he is removing the ribs, spine, or skull. I learned that this is achieved by high-frequency vibrations of the blade so that, when in contact with tissue, the rigid structure of the bone is cut while soft, elastic tissue remains unaffected.
I again attended sign-out sessions, this week only in genitourinary pathology. I have begun to really enjoy these sessions, and I’m a little sad that I won’t have the chance to learn from this expertise anymore. I also learned about hematopathology from a blood smear lecture and went to the gross conference again this week.

This summer immersion program taught me that it is important to understand the whole process in order to truly comprehend how each part fits into the bigger picture. In pathology, each step of preparing tissues affects the next step in the process: grossing affects embedding which affects the cutting and slide formation which can affect the final diagnosis. Each part has to be done properly and documented well to make sure everything is clearly communicated. The clinic is the bigger picture in a lot of the engineering that we do, so recognizing where the requirements originate is vital.

I genuinely loved my time here in surgical pathology. I was completely out of my element, but that made everything much more exciting! I am very grateful to my clinical mentor, Dr. Robinson, and all of the other pathologists, residents, pathologists’ assistants, technologists, and staff for their help this summer (and for answering all of my questions!). It will be sad to leave the hospital, but I guess it’s time to begin grad school!

Rose Buchmann

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