Week 2 - Mary Clare McCorry

One thing that I have learned being in the hospital is that summer is a busy time. A teaching hospital not only has fellows, residents, and med students looking to learn from the clinicians, but also undergraduate and high school students interested in studying medicine. There is also other programs such as BME Summer Immersion thrown into the mix. My clinician's time this summer is divided between several students. As a result, I was not able to see patients or surgeries with Dr. Rodeo this week. However I was able to to dedicate most of my time to my research project.

The lab that I am working in is Dr. Suzanne Maher's lab who conducts research with Dr. Warren and Dr. Rodeo. One of the advantages to working in Dr. Maher's lab is that it has a wide breadth of expertise and is heavily populated by postdocs. I spent a portion of my week with a Research Fellow  learning how to conduct q RTPCR, which is a way to quantify genetic expression. As an undergraduate I had conducted the q RTPCR protocol, but had never actually learned the theory behind the methods. Learning q RTPCR in the lab this week taught me both how to conduct the protocol, but also the theory behind it.

This week in the lab I also helped to disect menisci from juvenile and adult bovine. We harvested menisci to serve as controls for my research studies. During this upcoming week myself and a postdoc will do histological and q RTPCR analysis on the samples.

In addition to lab work this week I attended two grand rounds. One was for Arthroplasty/Joint Replacement (ARJR) and the other was for Sports Medicine. In ARJR grand rounds we talked about how to treat a complex intertrochanteric fracture. The first thing to do for this type of fracture is mobilize the joint early and conduct a hemi-arthroplasty in which you remove the femoral head and use a trochanter plate. A summer student also presented on the use of robotic hip replacement. Her research provided data to support the claim the robotic total hip replacement (THR) improves cup placement in THR which reduces postop complications.

Sports medicine rounds this week were especially interesting for me because each of the clinical fellows presented his or her year long research project. Each of the projects presented was a research project with direct clinical applications relavent to the fellow's specialty. As a researcher myself, it was interesting to see the potential for clinical relevance/translation. Two of the presenters were fellows doing research on meniscus (the subject of my Ph.D. thesis). One fellow used a finite element model to look at how the location and size of chondral defects effected knee joint mechanics, specifically the forces experienced by the meniscus. The other research fellow presented on the use of mesenchymal stem cells to improve scaffold-meniscus integration. Seeing these presentations helped me to realize the clinical relevance of my own research.

This upcoming week, I am scheduled to shadow Dr. Rodeo for both patient appointment and surgery. I plan to start conducting analysis on control samples in the lab as well as work to further optimize PCR primers. Additionally, I will be attending rounds in the PICU and emergency department.