Week 3

This week started out with one of the medical research summer students giving a presentation on alpha-2-macroglobulin and it's uses as a biologic agent. This sparked an interest in a new research project for myself and the other two summer students, and this is what the majority of my work was on this week. We prepared the study design for this project for the rest of the day Monday, and I also went down to meet with the radiologists to schedule a meeting for next Monday morning. At that meeting I hope to go over the patient cohort we will be looking at and learn how to grade MR images in addition to learning how to identify the presence of osteochondral lesions.

On Tuesday we continued to collect journal articles that would be relevant to our review by compiling searches in PubMed and EMBASE with specific key words. This led to a total collection of over 700 articles. The next two days involved cycling through these articles to eliminate repeats, and any that didn't fit our inclusion criteria for the study. By Thursday, we were able to start reading the papers and writing short summaries of the major results and any interesting discussion points. Starting next week, we will be able to outline the paper better and identify different sections that we can focus on. 

Also on Tuesday I was able to observe in clinic, and started collecting the intake for patients before Dr. Kennedy met with them. It's great to be able to go through the process of patient intake, looking at CT or MR images of the afflicted area, and then come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Unfortunately it was the last day in the office for two other workers, so we all went out to celebrate at happy hour at a bar on 65th street. It was great to hang out with my co-workers outside of the office. 

On Monday I will be presenting two patient profiles that Dr. Kennedy will be operating on. I am excited to learn how to present this information, and then have a better idea of what to expect during the surgeries that day. Looking forward to being in the OR again next week!