My mentor Dr. Bostrom was out of town most of this week. I spent one day in the OR observing him and one day in the OR observing Dr. Jerabeck. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Dr. Jerabeck utilizes robotic-assistant devices in his joint replacement surgeries. The goal of these devices is to ensure that the knee or hip implants are positioned in proper alignment. For proper alignment, the bone and cartilege in the original joint space needs to be cut away as perfect as possible. The robotic device ensures that you cut away the bone correctly and that your positioning of the implants are also correct.
I also spent time this week working on my final report for the summer immersion term. My summer research project was to investigate the literature for clinical studies about cementless fixation of knee replacements. Cementless knee replacements typically have higher revision rates than their cemented counterparts and are used much less frequently; however, in small comparative studies and in radiosteriographic studies, cementless knee replacements perform comparatively to cemented knees. New design components such as hydroxyapatite and trabecular metal coatings may improve clinical outcomes of cementless knee replacements to the point that they are more widely used.
I also gave a presentation to Dr. Bostrom's lab on Tuesday in which I showed them the imaging modality developed and used in my lab in Ithaca. Dr. Bostrom's lab is investigating changes in bone formation around a titanium implant following treatment with PTH (a bone growth agent used to treat osteoporosis). Our lab is able to perform high resolution 3D bone formation analyses and may be able to contribute to their upcoming study. They seemed very interested in my presentation and hopefully we can establish a collaboration with their lab.
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