Week 3 - Shenghao Tan

I spent the Sunday at NYP lower Manhattan since my clinician was on call there. Compared to the main hospital it is not as busy and, according to the clinician, allows better communication between the doctors and nursing staff. Lower Manhattan has integrated dialysis boxes in the rooms, which is apparently not common. For the weekdays I spend most of the mornings in the microbiology lab observing the benches, mostly urine and respiratory samples. I was able to observe the different methods of processing and pathogen IDing. One aspect I didn't expect was  the difference in diagnostic methods between benches: stool  samples are exclusively processed with nucleic acid amplification in BioFire GI panel; urine samples are processed by  colony morphology, staining and biochemical tests to identify the pathogens, and not much NAA; blood bench starts with incubation in  both aerobic an anaerobic bottles, with pathogen presence  identified from CO2 production, proceeded with identification via  NAA, biochemical tests, and MALDI-TOF. Matrix assisted laser desorption / ionization (MALDI) is a really cool mass spectroscopy technique to quantify different bacterial proteins to identify the pathogen. Each ID only takes around 20 seconds and reports the bacteria / yeast / fungi species, which is much faster than conventional PCR or biochemical methods. Another surprise was the mycology bench: unlike all other benches, the identification of  fungi is almost always through morphology under a microscope.

On Wednesday night I watched couple folks getting their MRI done for reasearch purposes. Got to see some brains and spines :D. The postdoc was really nice and knowledgable.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1

For my first week of immersion I attended the OR's of a few different physicians as my clinical mentor Dr. Jason Spector of plastic surgery and reconstruction was on vacation this week. I was able to see three different hernia repairs, and one double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap.  I think my favorite thing I saw was the double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap. From what I understand, this is a procedure in which both breasts were removed and fat from the stomach is used to reconstruct the breasts. The novelty of the DIEP flap is that it does not require the removal of muscle which allows patients to recover quicker. Additionally, blood vessels from the fat in the stomach are left in tact and "hooked up" to corresponding vessels in the breast. All in all, the procedure essentially amounted to a breast reconstruction and tummy tuck. It was a 10 hour surgery that required multiple doctors and departments, as this was not just a purely cosmetic procedure- the patient ...
Read more

Week 1

Image
  During my first week of Immersion at Weill Cornell Medicine, my clinical mentor, Dr. Jason Spector, was out of town. As a result, I spent my time shadowing other clinicians, familiarizing myself with the layout of the hospital, and introducing myself to his lab.  I witnessed four major types of surgery: gastric bypass, breast reconstruction, hernia repair, and craniectomy. Gastric bypass surgeries reduce the working size of the stomach with the intention of helping the patient lose weight by reducing appetite. This is accomplished by creating a small pouch from the stomach and passing over the first section of the small intestine.  The first breast reconstruction surgery was for a patient who was undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer. Temporary inflatable implants were surgically inserted as placeholders while she undergoes therapy. After her treatment is complete, she will return for polymeric-based implants. This case was interesting to witness since...
Read more

Week 1 - Robert Hawkins

Research - My project for this summer is going to focus on using a large national database that contains blood/plasma biomarker data, cognitive scores, and image data on ~6000 subjects that are either healthy, have mild cognitive impairment, or have Alzheimer's disease. Specifically, I will be looking for associations between neutrophil activation and reductions in cerebral blood flow, which is what my (Schaffer-Nishimura) lab in Ithaca is also investigating. I like this project because in the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab we only work with mice, and so it nice to now be able translate that work and to analyze some of the same measurements in human subjects. I am also learning how to use the statistical program 'R' for this project, which I think is a good skill to develop. Much of my week has been spent looking at this Alzheimer database and trying to find/extract the data that I need. I've already run into a few problems with this dataset in that there are not many patients ...
Read more