Week I: Reading Room

It is always exciting for me to come to New York City. Before coming to the City, I contacted my advisor Dr. Gupta and knew that I would not meet my advisor in the first week. Fortunately, he introduced me to Dr. Baradaran, the chief resident of the Neuroradiology Division. I met Dr. Baradaran on Tuesday afternoon and got to see the reading rooms of MRI, CT, and ultrasound. I then spent most of my time in the reading room. Even though the doctors in the reading room are busy with case analysis, they managed to answer my questions whenever I asked.

My first week mainly includes two parts: shadowing doctors in the reading room and taking conference lectures with residents and graduate medical students. My shadowing started with Dr. Johnson, where I observed how he analyzed the MRI and CT images of the patients. Back in Cornell Ithaca campus, I have some training in mouse craniotomy and optical imaging of mouse brain. So imaging of the brain is familiar to me. One thing I learned about was that asymmetry regions between left and right lobes of the brain are likely to be abnormal. Due to the resolution limitation in MRI and CT, we can only look at the brain on a more macroscopic scale compare to optical imaging. Artifacts, noise, and other factors when imaging can cause the degradation of images. These are some of the concerns in analyzing the patients' condition status. I also shadowed Dr. Chazen on Friday. When he knew we were engineering students, he shared to us some of the problems he hoped one day we could conquer through engineering methods. Also, I got to know Kumar, a graduate medical student in the hospital. He is very willing to share his understanding with me upon any of my silly questions. For example, I learned MRI does not always apply to patients with non-MRI-compatible devices on/near the body. This way we can only acquire CT and other images of the patients. I enjoyed the discussion with Kumar and other doctors in the reading rooms.

On the other hand, I took conference lectures given by Dr. Green on chest cases, Dr. Legasto on Role of chest radiography in trauma and Dr. Johnson on the suprahyoid neck. It was eye-opening for me to take these lectures as I have never been to any before. I like the way the doctors interact with the medical students and residents in the conference room. They are open to sharing any of their knowledge in the field of radiology to students. The openness made me feel comfortable, despite the fact that I did not get a majority of the medical terms in the lectures. I was impressed with Dr. Legasto's lecture on his step-by-step logics in reading images and the complexity of neck anatomy on Dr. Johnson's lecture. In Dr. Johnson's lecture, I learned that CT and MRI need to be combined if there is skull base involvement. Meanwhile, the tradeoff existed between T1 and T2 images. For example, fat will suppress T2 weighted axial sequences and post contrast fact will suppress T1 axial images in MRI.

Generally speaking, I experienced a very different environment. Through shadowing the doctors in the reading room, I realized there were still quite a few limitations of the current imaging technology. I hope I could help in solving some of the issues out there. For the next week, I hope I could meet my advisor, get more clinical exposure and observe some surgeries.