This week I worked on my research project, which is to write an algorithm capable of quantifying the signal content in PET images showing chemotherapeutic drug distribution. I attended Dr. Souweidane's clinical appointments, where patients ranged from infants to adults. Some patients expressed headache symptoms and their imaging revealed the presence of cysts. From observing these patient interactions and the corresponding CT and MRI data I was able to learn how clinicians distinguish benign cysts from cancerous tumors in the adult brain.
I observed two surgeries, both pediatric. The first surgery was the installation of a brain plate in a child who had previously had surgery that removed part of the skull in order to make room for the brain to grow. In the second surgery, the patient had a congenital defect that resulted in an asymmetric skull. The neurosurgical and plastic surgery teams worked together on this patient to remove a healthy, normal portion of bone from a self-healing portion of the skull and replaced the malformed forehead with this tissue.
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