Week 6 - Mary Clare

With short programs such as the Cornell Clinical Immersion, you always find that everything seems to come together at the end. This week, I was fortunate enough to see a total knee replacement and a company vendor do platelet rich plasma isolation for coating bone plugs. I also got my PCRs to finally show some good results and my experiment run and ready to analyze for the last week.

This week I got to see the Chief of Surgery at HSS, Dr. Warren, perform a total knee replacement. For the team performing the total knee replacement surgery, the process is so routine for them that a total knee replacement is almost like a changing a tire.  I had always imagined the process to be graphic, however, the process was rather clean with minimal blood loss compared to what I was expecting. From a biomedical engineering perspective it was great to see what kind of tools they were using to help establish replacement alignment and size. Also, I was able to ask questions about what kind of material they were using for the replacement.

I also spent a day with Dr. Rodeo, my clinical advisor, watching surgeries. One of the more interesting surgeries was a hamstring reattachment. For this particular surgery, they had called in a hand surgeon at the hospital. This is because a hand surgeon is familiar with working and identifying nerves. Since the hamstring is so close to a major nerve in your leg, the sciatic nerve, it was necessary to have a specialist present to isolate and protect the nerve. 

During surgeries, I always find talking to the vendors interesting. During two of the surgeries a vendor was present with a machine process to isolate stem cells from bone marrow. My thesis project works with stem cells, so it was great to talk to the vendor about their process and the efficiency of the device design. This particular vendor works with all the doctors in that area and actually is the one sending mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to our lab back in Ithaca. Small world.  

This week my research project reached some conclusions on the PCR process to analyze RNA expression in meniscus explants. Since we finally have some solid conclusions for this, we were able to move forward with the mechanical stimulation of explants using the bioreactor. Another exciting experience in the lab this week, was going to the knee simulator lab and loading the human cadavers for the labs human meniscus studies using cadavers. This week, I will be wrapping up analysis for my experiments.