Week 5 - Katie

This week was much more eventful than last week. In the morning on Monday I went down with a co-worker to take x-rays of the rats that we had previously performed surgery on. This was very straight forward as the machine was essentially a lead-lined box the size of a microwave. At noon I started my observation rotation in the ER. I was a little worried about my reception because the attending physician wasn’t expecting me but everyone was very accommodating and I was assigned to shadow the chief resident.

I was expecting a constant barrage of trauma victims, cardiac arrests and strokes. In reality, although the ER was busy, most cases were not urgent or life threatening. One man came in with side stomach pains and blood in his urine, suggesting he had kidney stones which an MRI confirmed. Many people came in general pain or sickness that had gotten worse over the weekend. The one startling case while I was shadowing was a cardiac arrest victim who came in on an ambulance. I watched as a team of four performed CPR. The patient regained a pulse and was sent to the OR. I learned a lot about the ER in the 8 hours I was there, including how much documentation is generated but kept only at NYP. I asked if charts were shared between hospitals but the chief resident said that it was rare and that they rely heavily on oral patient histories which must be repeated to each person who treats them. I think that dictation and filing software would allow doctors to spend more time seeing patients.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I went to the clinic with Dr. Hartl again. I had the chance to open and look at images on my own before Dr. Hartl gave his diagnosis. This was an interesting exercise in reading MRIs. On Wednesday the Spine Center holds their Spine Conference. The collaboration between colleagues is nice to see as Dr. Hartl works allow for the most part when in the clinic.

On Thursday and Friday I worked on my project. We determined that we could export files in an ‘Analyze’ format that would maintain the original relaxation times of the samples. This will allow me to calculate a histogram of the relaxation times for each sample and compare two distinct groups more easily.

My most important observation this week is that while engineers are trained to be quantitative in our analysis, doctors are trained to be qualitative. This accounts for most of our diverging viewpoints on the relative importance of results and their ability to diagnose by looking at a general picture without any numerical data.