Week 4

This week I made progress on both my individual research project and the review paper I am working on with the other summer medical research students. Monday I presented the patient cases to Dr. Kennedy and the group for the surgeries they would be doing that day. This involved me collecting patients intake forms, their diagnosis, all relevant radiographic images, and explaining the plan for each surgery. It was interesting that most surgeries involved more than one procedure, and I was able to learn more about different surgical techniques. Afterwards I met with Dr. Deyer in radiology to discuss and outline what I needed from the MR images for my study. This was a very productive meeting, and I was able to get access to the East River PACS system to help with organizing patient information. This will make it easier for Dr. Deyer to collect the information and also for me to analyze it once collected. I finished working on the spreadsheets and then outline the research proposal with specific aims and hypotheses that we will be testing. I kept in touch with Dr. Deyer throughout the week, and will meet with them on Friday morning to go over the radiographs. This way I can also learn how to score the radiographs and I can score the images myself to allow for intra-observer error to be calculated.

For the review paper, we finished narrowing down the list of studies we will investigate, and developed a modified Horn's method for evaluating the quality of evidence presented in the in vitro and in vivo studies. Now we will go through the papers, evaluate them with the modified Horn scale, and also start collecting the main findings. This way next week we will be able to organize the outline of the paper and the main sub headings that we will focus on.

I was able to be in the clinic twice this week, and get much more experience with the intake process of new patients. I'm really enjoying both the clinic and the operating room, I already feel as if I have learned so much. This immersion program has made me realize how great it is to work with clinicians and I think that collaborations between clinicians and engineers would only benefit the research community.