Week 2 - Amanda

This week was a lot slower. Dr. Prince was out of town, so I was left to my own devices. I am determined to finish my research project within the 7 week time limit, yet want to maximize my efficacy/progress during the time spent on it so I have time to enjoy the city. Thus, I spent most of the week setting up meetings with various PhD students and research associates that work in the MRI field to ask them questions about MR image analysis, typical MR experiments, etc. I discovered that many of the radiologists make very crude measurements of various objects in MR images. For example, if you wish to find the area of a blood vessel you simply choose the ROI (region of interest) tool, click around the vessel as you see fit, and the program gives you an area. This may be suitable for a rough measurement of vessel area, but I prefer a more accurate and less human-error-prone approach to measuring areas, especially when the physiological effect I'm exploring may not be dramatic. After meeting with a few researchers, I decided it is worth writing a basic algorithm to find the vessel areas for me using thresholding or segmentation. Not only will this increase the accuracy of my measurements, but it will also be useful for the radiologists/researchers if I make it user friendly. I have some images that I can test my algorithm on, so a lot of my research time over the next week will involve code writing and testing.

In the midst of my research, I had the opportunity to see brain surgery. I arrived in the operating room just as the surgeons were removing a large tumor (over 3 cm in diameter!) from the brain. Although I never heard where the tumor was actually located, it appeared to be in the lower left quadrant, probably within the parietal lobe. This was the first surgery I have observed in person, so I was a little afraid that I might faint or panic. Fortunately, the blood did not bother me and my curiosity about the surgical technique and proceedings kept me from dwelling on the fact that I was indeed watching brain surgery. It wasn't until the surgeons left and the resident began stitching the scalp back up that it hit me, "This is a real person being operated on." The surgical drapes and equipment covering the patient during the operation leave only the surgical area exposed, making it easy to forget that this wasn't a simulation. I stayed throughout the whole cleanup process, watching how they closed the wound, cleaned up the surgical area and patient, and eventually woke up the patient.

Despite my distraction with the novelty of surgery, I noticed several things only an engineer would notice about an operating room. The resident used a headlamp for illumination while suturing, which consisted of a bright light source. Rather than being portable, the lamp on her head was connected to an optical fiber (I assume) that ran under her sterilized scrubs and connected to the light source, a very large and clunky box on a rolling cart. She continuously reached the end of the fiber range and the attentive first year med student would roll it closer to her so it wouldn't pull. I found it interesting that a smaller, more user friendly light source hasn't been developed. Next time I may ask about the light source if the doctors aren't busy. The requirement for equipment robustness became evident when she unplugged the head lamp at the end while cleaning up the patient, leaving the fiber dragging along behind on the floor. Most fibers can't take this abuse, as the optical coupling of light source to fiber has to stay pristinely clean. However, the engineer had foreseen this and devised a special tip that appeared to protect it. It's already obvious that a biomedical engineer specializing in device design absolutely needs to see the environment in which the device will be used. Otherwise, I'm sure the result would be disastrous. Next week, I hope to see more surgeries and perhaps notice more places where engineering and medicine intersect.