Michael Yancey - Dr. Ting Cong - Week 8

It's difficult to leave when the projects you've been working on for so long are unfinished, although I suppose there's rarely ever a point in time where the science is wrapped up neatly and shelved for good.

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This week, for the alginate hydrogel project with the Khormaee lab, we attempted to re-image some of our prior gels to obtain a later time point. However, we were not able to visualize any cells—whether this is due to some change in the hydrogel over time or something occurred to the cells themselves, we are unsure. 

We also received training on using Imaris software for analyzing our cell image stacks. We determined processes within the software to correct for changes in background intensity (which is a frequent problem within our hydrogels), correctly identify cells, and track cell movements over time. As we've previously noted before, cell movement is very minimal within the gels; however, the program picks up on small cell movements that we cannot discern as easily just by looking at the raw images. We also determined a plan for gathering cell density as a function of distance from the titanium substrate as supplemental data on top of cell migration patterns.

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For the femoral head impaction project, I am continuing to analyze the average Hounsfield units (HU) within the defect volume for each of our samples. HU seems to be approximately 400 on average within the defect volume—for reference, cortical bone is typically 1000 HU. The Osteopearl graft beads themselves are dense bone and individually should have about 1000 HU; however, because there are empty spaces between each bead, the defect volume as a whole has a significantly lower average HU value.

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This summer immersion term has been a great experience. In my time working at HSS before the immersion term, I had not yet had the opportunity to see surgeries in person. Actually experiencing surgical environments and interfacing with more clinicians helped me to better understand real-life needs in orthopedics and how the science and technologies I work with impact surgical techniques and standards of care.


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