Final week: Radiology fun and bittersweet goodbye to NYC

Monday: Dr. Prince today gave a very informative lecture about diagnostic radiology. Before the lecture, I was never really interested in radiology. Even though I took a couple classes in image processing that handled medical images to help diagnostics, it was never something interesting to me. In this lecture though, Dr. Prince introduced diagnostic radiology in a case-by-case basis. He asked us to identify the type of images and the body parts shown in the image. Through this process, certain characteristics were drilled in our mind that I don’t think I would forget again. For example, it was confusing between CT images and MRI for most of us but Dr. Prince stated that CT images were mostly lateral images but MRI could be taken from any directional plane. From first glance, a lot of the images appeared to be quite normal, but with Dr. Prince’s guidance, most of us were able to trace the structures of body and eventually identify the abnormality shown in the image and give the correct diagnostics.

One very interesting case I remembered were an MRI image of a pregnant woman. This was the first time I saw an MRI image of pregnant woman and I never knew they allowed radioactive imaging for pregnant woman since everyone was paranoid about the defects of babies that can result from radioactive materials. As far as I knew, I only heard ultrasound that was used during pregnancy. Dr. Prince told us MRI would only be used when there were some significant concerning features they saw in ultrasound images. In this image, the baby can be clearly seen with the head upside-down and placenta attached to the uterus. The image looked perfectly normal at first, but with Dr. Prince’s guidance, we gradually noticed there were some fatty-like material close to the baby’s neck. At first glance, it almost looked at a separate brain, which caused concerns among us since we thought it was an under-developed or defected twin sibling of the baby we already saw. However, Dr. Prince informed us that the condition was cystic hygroma that usually was caused by genetic defects or alcohol/drug use during pregnancy. The size of the cyst was almost same as the size of the baby’s head and was really concerning. Nonetheless, after a little researching on the internet later, I found out that the condition is usually treatable either by surgical removal or chemotherapy after the baby is born. However, the other case of pregnant woman was not so lucky.  The woman had twins but one had a missing placenta and the other had encephaloceles (had brain growing outside of the skull). Dr. Prince said the woman decided to terminate pregnancy and lose both children and they would not be able to survive even though she chose to continue. 

Side note: also after seeing the leakage of breast implant from an MRI image, I think I would never guess a breast implant in my life even though it’s absolutely safe. The image was so bright due to the silicone from the implant and no blood vessel and normal breast tissue could be seen. 

At the end this comes to the end of summer immersion. During this summer, I had the chance to observe in the operating room and ICU talking to patients who were trying to fight the disease; I also got the chance to experience the very border between life and death in the pathology meetings. All of those were something I couldn't expect as a normal scientist and only in the lab. I was surprised and happy to know that there are people thrilled to know about my research and how it could change the life of other patients like them. I really thanked the doctors and residents who were willing to teach and explain to me the anatomy and pathology. I also really thanked those patients who were willing to present themselves as subjects for us to get better understanding of the diseases. Now I m heading back to my lab in ithaca but I will never forget this experience and it will continue to be my encouragement and motivation to make my research meaningful to the biomedical world.