Week 4

My week was highlighted by a few cool surgical procedures. On Monday, I shadowed Dr. Lau’s and Dr. Girardi’s team in the cardiothoracic surgery department. Two open-heart surgeries were going on at the same time and I was able to jump in and out of surgeries to watch both. A bioprosthetic mitral valve implant surgery and a coronary artery bypass were performed. That was my first time to see an open heart surgery in person. The smell of blood and burning flesh by the electric cauterizer made these surgeries particularly memorable. Both surgeries went really smoothly. The attending surgeons explained how the sutures were done to prevent blood leaks which were really interesting to learn. As a side note, I had a conversation with an anesthesiologist and learned that the perfusion of major organs cannot be directly monitored, and being able to monitor this would revolutionize almost all anesthesiology procedures. He was conducting a research project related to noninvasive organ perfusion monitoring, and I might help him establish a connection with the Biomedical Engineering department in the future.

I was able to shadow Dr. Spector during plastic surgery. The patient suffered from nerve damage to her left face due to tumor removal. Her face became asymmetrical as a result, therefore Dr. Spector performed facelift surgery. Dr. Spector also used an electric nerve stimulator during the surgery to look for the sign of nerve recovery, although unlikely. Unfortunately, there was no detectable nerve recovery. A nerve reconnection surgery would be required in the future, this surgery would first harvest a nerve from the leg to restore the damaged nerve connection of the face. On Thursday, I shadowed Dr. Spector in the clinic and was able to see some patients after surgery. I saw images of patients before the surgery and seeing them after a recovery period really highlighted how well the surgery worked.


As of research, this week has been really productive. I worked with a med student to design and build a small bioreactor for culturing engineered blood vessels on Monday and Tuesday. We then cast collagen in the device and created channels inside the collagens on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we successfully seeded endothelial inside the channel. The cells were left in static condition over the weekend for attachment. We will start perfusion next week and look for in vitro angiogenesis. This system will be used to study the angiogenesis of tumor tissue collected from patients. 

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