Working with Dr. Hu

BME Clinical Immersion. Week 1 (June 6^th – June 13^th)

Living in Manhattan for this past week has been an amazing and yet expensive experience! I have been exploring the city, having amazing Latin food, and getting crazy and broke at the stores. Last weekend was a good time to get used to the location, buy groceries, and get ready for the begging of the experience.

Last Monday, I was all set with my ID and HR paperwork at 10:00 am. I meet Dr. Jim Hu, who is an Urologist/Oncologist and had a nice conversation about his work while having lunch at the hospital.  Dr. Hu is the director of the Lefrak Center for Robotic Surgery, and he brought the Da Vinci robots to NY Presbyterian two years ago. We talked about robotic targeted biopsy outcomes being the main focused of his research and the direction in which my project will focus on. Later on the day, I met Lauren Chen, who is Dr. Hu’s research coordinator and who provided me some literature (a lot!) to understand better Dr. Hu’s research and to find the possible project I would like to work in. On Tuesday, I met with the rest of the research team (two urology residents, and a 4^th year med student). I got better insights into the project, more information, and a work space. The project consists on studying the outcomes of PIRADS 2.0 compared to PIRADS 1.0. PIRADS is a new platform used for the robot biopsies. There are not published studies on the performance of the platform, so Dr. Hu and his colleagues are working on such project. Wednesday was the robotic biopsy day; I attended 5 targeted biopsies. During prostate targeted biopsy, tissue samples from 12 defined regions of interest are obtained.  It uses a fusion of MRI/US to detect specific regions of the prostate. After attending to the biopsies, I also went with Dr. Hu to several patient consultations where I had the opportunity to talk to the patients about their experience after robotic prostatectomy and the outcomes of the surgery six months after the treatment. Such data will be used in the study. Thursday was a very exciting day in which I attend two cancer board meetings where med students get prepared for the board exams. The meetings were very educational and didactic since we visited different places in the hospital that are used for different kinds of treatment.

Finally, on Friday, I attended to a robotic partial nephrectomy. It was the first time that I had access to an OR and it is amazing yet stressful at the same time to see how much action is happening in such a place. About ten people besides Dr. Hu were present in the OR. Some of them running the robot and making sure everything was going well, some others preparing the equipment, three in charge of preparing the patient, a couple of med students, resident, and so on. It was definitely a great experience! There were two consoles for the Da Vinci Robot and I had the opportunity to observe the whole process in one of them while Dr. Hu worked in the other one.  Doing a clinical internship before, I had the opportunity to see a Da Vinci robot (which are not very common in every hospital), but I never had the opportunity before to observe a surgery or to experience the console. Dr. Hu and his resident removed a 3.6 cm mass from the right kidney of a 28 year old male. After the removal, I had the opportunity to touch the mass (covered in plastic) which didn’t seem to be fibrous nor very stiff; reason why Dr. Hu thought that it was possible not cancer. I haven’t got any more details about the pathology of the mass but let’s hope it wasn’t cancer!!

As a whole it was a very exciting, busy, and full of action week….looking forward to one that seems to be even better!