BME Summer Immersion 2024

This was the final week of immersion. I spent Monday working on finalizing my final presentation and literature review which I have been working on this summer. On Tuesday, I gave my presentation along with some of my peers. It was cool to see what all the other cardiac people were working on! On Wednesday, I took the day off work to check off an NYC bucket list item, and went to the Bronx zoo. It was a great trip and I saw lots of cool birds. After that, we returned to the upper east side for our farewell dinner with all the immersion students. We had some great conversations with Dr. Wang about the use of AI, and with Kelly about the organizational aspects of immersion. It was a great conclusion to an exciting and productive summer! 

During the final week of the immersion term, I focused on developing a plan to continue several analysis projects into the Fall. At this point, the data transfers are complete, and I have developed a foundational understanding of the datasets and questions that Dr. Cristofanilli's lab is interested in answering. Throughout the summer, I observed the collection of a multitude of liquid biopsy and clinical data types. By shadowing Dr. Cristofanilli in the clinic, I was able to see when and how these data types provide valuable insights into disease progression and may be used to guide patient care. In addition to the intellectual usefulness of this experience, I am very grateful for the emotional element. Engineers don't often get to see the implementation of the work they do, especially in a medical setting. My experiences this summer were centered around the human experience of the result of biomedical research, something that will motivate me throughout my career.  On Tuesday,...

 This was my final week working at HSS. On Monday I spent the entire day working with Dr. Anju Malhotra. Dr. Malhotra is an anesthesiologist and focuses on pain management. For this I was shadowing both the clinic and the procedures that he performed. I was mainly interested in this because of the work I am staring up in Ithaca with a focus in pain. This gave me a great deal of insight in how pain is perceived and how it is managed in a clinical setting and could possibly make it easier to transition my pre-clinical work to the clinical side. On Tuesday I spent time in the clinic and spoke with a design engineer about what they do. This meeting was mainly used as a way to gauge what the design engineers do. Their focus is on designing custom implants for special cases. They work very closely with many of the implant manufacture to create implants. They also work closely with surgeons and research engineers in impact development. Since these engineers have a lot of experience workin...

 My final week of immersion I did some more shadowing in the cath lab and watched more aortic valve replacements following similar procedures as those I had previously witnessed. I also did more work to further refine device development of the catheter device I have been working on with Dr.Chen. after some initial consultation with manufacturers we realized some of the specification were not going to be realistic and as such I redesigned the device to match geometries that are possible with current manufacturing methods. After watching many more catheter procedures I was also able to tweak the design to better fit in with the currently used technology related to the device. This will make its use more accessible and affordable since doctors already have the tools needed to operate it. Overall, this has helped me realize how big an influence device design can have on medical accessibility. The tiny details I learned about through in depth shadowing helped me realize what is truly im...

The final week of immersion was similar to week 7 as I continued to shadow/assist Alex Piacentini while he cultured cells and loaded them in a Flexcell in vitro model (shown below).  Once again, I got to see how the final tendon construct is formed and placed under load via vacuum, and how cell viability is measured. This experimental group was placed under a 10% strain and compared to unloaded constructs (pictured). Subsequently, the midsubstance of the tendon was again resected and inflammatory markers were identified via qPCR  to ensure that the tendon was in an overloaded state. Once it is demonstrated that 10% strain causes sufficient overload, another round of experiments will be run with 10% strain controls and 10% strain YAP/TAZ inhibition treatments, to assess how this signaling interruption alters the expression profile of the tendon (measured via transcriptional profiling).  I also saw my peers present their research in our weekly cohort meeting, and got t...

 This week I implemented another AI to study the lung cancer metastasis predictors. Unlike the sequential model which predicts time until diagnosis, the new random forest model predicts which features are the most impactful for the prediction. I was surprised to see several of the diagnosis predictors, many of which seem largely unrelated, and I am curious how the results will compare to the Cox model Eunji is using for a similar purpose. This is the last blog post I will be making about the project, but I will be continuing to work on it into the academic year with the Tamimi lab.

I collected two intervertebral disc samples from Dr. Roger Hartl's C5/6/7 disc replacement case. We have an ongoing collaboration between Dr. Bonassar's lab and the neurosurgery department to collect these tissue samples. While waiting for the tissue to be collected, I was able to observe the surgery being performed. The anterior cervical discectomy was performed by opening the patient up from the front of the neck and using microsurgery to get to the spine. Two screws were placed across the disc that needed to be replaced. Then, the disc tissue was scraped away, almost looking like cold butter shavings. These were collected into a specimen jar. Vendors from NuVasive were then with guidance on how to use their "Simplify Cervical Disc Tool" that was used to first spread apart the vertebrae, and then put in the spacer that will be used as the replacement. These were all put into the disc space with an impactor/hammer and x-rays were used throughout the insertion to dete...