Week 2 of immersion

Since Dr. Weinsaft is out of town on Monday, I shadowed one of the cardiology fellows - Dr. Hagopian in the clinic. I observe a few nuclear stress tests which I found interesting. Nuclear stress testing is used to determine the perfusion of the myocardium, which could indicate the health of the coronary artery. First, the patients' hearts are put under stress either through exercise or drugs. Then a radioactive tracking agent is injected intravenously. When the heart is well perfused, the myocardium should have uniform radioactivity while parts they are under perfused would be less radioactive; the radioactivity can be captured and reconstructed into images of the hearts. A few patients that I observed did not have any abnormal perfusion, so they could leave right after the procedure. The one with abnormal heart perfusion had to stay for another scan when the heart is not under stress to determine whether the abnormal perfusion is perpetual or only stress-related. The patients were then sent to a catheterization laboratory to determine the location of coronary there blockage to determine the best treatment. 

I was also able to observe some procedures done in the catheterization laboratory. A catheter is inserted into the patient's heart through an artery on the wrist. Then the doctors inject a contrast agent through the catheter, and when the contract agent goes into the coronary arteries, the perfusion of the coronary arteries can be observed through an X-ray. I saw a patient with just one blockage which is a mild case. Therefore the blockage was fixed right away through a percutaneously delivered stent. However, I also observed a patient with multiple blockages, which would require open-chest coronary bypass surgery. 

I was able to attend the two-session MRI training on Tuesday and Wednesday. A postdoc and a grad student in Dr. Yi Wang's lab taught us the principle of MRI, and how to operate one of the MRI machines they use for research. I learned the operation of the MRI machine on Tuesday by scanning a phantom. On Wednesday, I volunteered to get my brain scanned as part of their study, I was also able to operate the MRI machine to scan my colleague’s brains. The postdoc will extract the 3D structure of our brains and send us STL files for that. I am planning on 3D print our brains when I get back to Ithaca. 

For research, I started helping on a project on analyzing cardiac MRI files and determining the strain of the hearts during cardiac cycles. Early next week, I will start my own project by applying the same technique to analyze other cardiac MRI images.

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