Week 4 - Austin Bunce

  Clinical:

    This week I was very busy in the OR.  I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday shadowing Dr. Schwartz in surgery this week.  On Tuesday I got to tag along with Rick, who is shadowing Dr. Kaplitt.  We got to see some deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants for Parkinson's disease, which is a topic of interest to me.  I have done a few research reports on DBS and therefore it was really great to see its implementation in the real world.  We also got to observe a Medtronic pain pump implant into the spine for chronic pain.  Overall it was really good to change up the doctor I was shadowing and I'm thankful that Rick let me come along with him.

    I returned the favor the next day as Rick came with me to shadow Dr. Schwartz.  We got to see a few tumor removals, which were pretty similar to the ones I've seen before.  On Thursday I had more students from my program come along with me to the OR.  Thursday was super interesting as we got to see some surgeries relating to epilepsy.  This was another interest of mine coming in so I was very excited to see these surgeries.  We got to see a robot assisted surgery where electrodes were implanted to help localize the focal point of seizures in the patient.  Then we got to see the next portion of that procedure in a different patient where the electrodes were removed and the seizure focus was resected.  It was pretty crazy to see this surgery because the patient had to have a large portion of their brain removed to try to stop the seizures.  

    I am feeling mostly content with the surgeries I have been able to see so far.  I will go to the OR a few more times to let some other student from my program come along but besides that I want to concentrate on my research for most of the rest of my time here.  

Research:

    I did not get much time to work in the lab this week due to the large amount of time I spent in the OR.  I am still working on my second project, where I am looking to classify seizures from EEG data from epileptogenic mice.  This week I just played around with setting up the loading of the data into Matlab and started to do some reading from literature on seizure classification methods.  I need to do some more work on this project and I will spend a lot of my time this weekend as well as next week on this project.  

NYC:

    Last weekend was pretty eventful for me.  I was able to go see The Met, the Statue of Liberty,  the bull on Wall St., and the World Trade Center.  We watched to Euro Cup and Copa America finals last weekend along with the NBA finals games.  The NBA finals are still going on and are now tied 2-2, and I am heavily invested because the Bucks are in the finals this year.  There was plenty of things I did during the week as well such as going out to eat, and hanging out down in the student lounge.  There are so many things to do here that it is feeling a bit tedious to note every fun thing I did in the city during the week.  Therefore I will leave this part of my update here and just add a few pictures to summarize my outside of work experiences.  







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