Week 5 - Rick Zirkel

 Clinical: This week I was able to shadow Dr. Kaplitt again. In the OR I got to see a Carniectomy for the first time. This is a procedure aimed at alleviating pressure in the brain usually brought on by a traumatic brain injury. Part of the skull was removed as an initial relief. There was also connective tissue putting pressure on a large cranial nerve. To alleviate the pressure the connective tissue around the nerve was cut. It was a very intricate procedure and had to be handled with extreme caution as to not risk any damage to the nerve. This specific nerve was the trigeminal or facial nerve. The patient was experiencing pain in the face, which was brought on by the pressure on the nerve. If the nerve was damaged, the patient would have had loss of sensation within the face.

Research: I helped conduct another pilot TMS mouse study to determine the extent to which the mice were able to be exposed to the magnetic field stimulation without causing adverse affects, namely severe twitching. This was done by placing the mouse in a cylindrical glass container and placing them on top of the center of the coil. The magnetic field stimulation was pulsed at varying percentages of power from 3 to 18%. The maximum power of the coil is 3T. We recorded the phenotype of the mice at each pulse to examine any twitching response.

    My cannula implants also arrived and I conducted a pilot surgery during which I implanted bilateral cannulas into our region of interest, the dorsal striatum. The mouse was allowed to recover and is healthy and active. I will be performing the experimental surgeries at the end of next week. Because of the time it took for the implants to arrive I will need to come back on a weekend two weeks from the day of the surgeries to conduct the actual imaging. It has been incredibly frustrating having setbacks to my research here and I am disappointed as I came into it expecting to be able to conduct a good deal of research, as we had a thoroughly planned out project for me coming into it.

Although my research here has been rather discouraging and disappointing, I can still focus on the positives, such as the MRI I was able to get of my brain this week. I am very excited to be able to have a scan of my brain to take home.

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