This past week started with a long weekend due to the 4th of July falling on a Monday. I took this time to visit family in Vermont, and get out of the city for a bit. It was beautiful and refreshing to spend time away from skyscrapers and subways, and more time with family. I headed back to New York City Monday evening and was refreshed for a new work week.
Dr. Kennedy and I have been discussing a longer-term collaboration involving a robot that can simulate natural gait movement in cadaver ankles and knees. This could be an exciting way to connect the tissue-scale lubrication studies that I have been involved with at Cornell to a joint-scale study. I spent the week reading literature on this topic, and investigating other biomechanical studies. I hope to solidify a research topic and start planning logistics for time and how I will travel between campuses for the upcoming year by next week. This will involve a discussion with Dr. Bonassar and Dr. Fortier since they are both experts in this area of research.
In the mean time, I gave an overview of cartilage lubrication to Dr. Kennedy's research group, and continued work on my pre-operative OLT study. I finished going through all of the patient records with Dr. Deyer, and will compile the final spreadsheet of information this week. Next week I will send out the data, list of hypotheses, and potential data table to Robin for him to run statistical analyses on. This way I will hopefully be able to complete this study by the end of my time here. The only roadblock for this is that previously established quantitative grading scales for osteochondral lesions on MR images don't correlate well with clinical outcomes, and/or only apply to post-operative MR images showing repaired tissue. I will continue to look for other grading scales to apply to this study in order to improve the quality of evidence.
We also are continuing to work on the review paper for alpha-2 macroglobulin, while also spending time in the clinic and OR. Enough time has passed that I have been able to see patients that have come in as new patients, observed their surgery, and are now seeing them post-operatively in the clinic. It is cool to see the whole cycle. In addition, the whole time I am able to see the current technological limitations, whether it is imaging or non-ideal surgical tools, and how a collaboration between engineers and clinicians could improve medical care.
The immersion term offers PhD candidates in biomedical engineering 7 weeks of first-hand experience in a clinical environment with physicians at Weill Cornell Medical College and associated institutions. Students observe physicians in various settings and participate in clinical research. This blog is a record of these experiences by the term participants.
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