On Monday I went on rounds with the physicians in the NICU at NYP. The rounds started at 9 and continued until about 12 because there were so many patients to see. I was impressed by the amount of attention given to each baby. Each nurse was assigned to only a couple babies and a doctor was also personally assigned to each baby even though all the physicians consulted on rounds. I have never seen so many tiny babies. Some had as little gestation time as 25 weeks where the normal gestation time for a full term baby is 40 weeks or more. I was told that treatment for neonates less than 30 weeks has improved significantly over the last 25 years and it is clear that technological advancements have helped significantly.
At first I was lost when the doctors started reviewing their babies’ numbers. What is the difference between an ‘indirect’ and direct? Is it true that these babies only eat about 90 calories a day? I didn’t have any idea what ‘normal’ was for a newborn or, in some cases, what the statistics meant at all. I started to pick up on certain words I recognized and slowly things started to make more sense. I also made a mental list of words or terms I did not know so I could look them up later.
From a purely engineering perspective, I was frustrated by the number of alarms going off at each bed. Most seemed unimportant judging by the doctors’ reactions but it seems like it takes immense amounts of conditioning to pick out which alarms are important for each baby. I think there may be a better way for the information on the monitors to be displayed and communicated. I will ask the doctors and nurses about the alarms the next time I go on rounds.
Monday afternoon I attended a surgery by Dr. Hartl. He was doing a decompression and he explained is approach and that he was going to be using the microscope which has a display. I’m starting to understand the real anatomy of the spine as seen during surgery, but I still need to watch more videos so I won’t be quite as lost. Without knowledge of what is supposed to be happening, surgeries can all start to look the same.
On Tuesday we had a research group meeting. I was assigned to work on data analysis for both Peter’s paper and our paper on annular repair. I learned how to analyze the MR images that we get from the rat tails that we use in our experiments. I was surprised that it was difficult to get good data from the program associated with the MRI machine so I am in the process of writing a Matlab program that will allow us to analyze the raw data more easily and specifically in the way we need. The program cannot give us a listing of the relaxation times per voxel so I will process the DICOM images separately.
On Wednesday I visited patients with Dr. Hartl. This time we met not only with elderly patients, but with several younger patients as well including a trauma case. It made the experience much more real. I’m getting much better at recognizing the problem areas in the MRIs before Dr. Hartl tells me. Reading these images and localization of pain are the best ways to diagnose patients. We also went on rounds to visit patients still in the hospital after surgery. They are up and walking around very soon after they wake up.
Thursday and Friday I worked on my Matlab program and clarified some of my questions about the data. Dr. Hartl has left for Tanzinia so I will be focusing much more on my project next week.
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