Rachel Matthews - Dr. Gauthier - Week 3

 This week, I could only shadow one procedure following the plastic surgery team as they performed a double mastectomy. I arrived as the team was marking where the initial incisions would be to ensure symmetry. This took longer than other surgeries that I have seen because the surgeons had to consider not only the area needed but also the physical appearance of the surgical site after the procedure. Two surgeons worked together, one for each side of the patient. Both took their time cutting into the skin and removing the breast tissue and additional fat layers in the region. This took quite a long time because the surgeons had to carefully remove the tissue without damaging the surrounding tissue and cauterizing sections to reduce the bleeding. As expected the surgeons removed a relatively large amount of tissue, leaving a large area exposed which they initially closed with staples before making the final closure taking their time to reduce the visibility of the scar. 

The rest of my time was spent working on my research project, attempting to understand two segmentation pipelines better. However, this has taken a lot of troubleshooting to get access to and run these pipelines effectively. These pipelines use different statistical models that calculate the image intensity values from corresponding MRI images to estimate the center and edge of the lesion.