This week was all about shadowing Dr. Osborne in his clinic and spent quality time in the reading room learning to interpret CT/PET scans. I also happened to witness a couple of interventional radiology procedures. The most interesting interventional radiology procedure was to reduce the size of liver tumors using microspheres (SIR microspheres - www.sirtex.com) tagged with radioactive yittrium (half life of about 6 days). This involved injecting these spheres directly into the hepatic artery of the patient and they reached the tumor directly to owing to the enhanced permeability and retention effect. The procedure began by calculating the dose with the help of PET scans and injecting them in patients and monitoring the size of the tumor a week after injection using PET scans. It is a very simple procedure with just a catheter introduced to the hepatic artery and patients walk back home after the procedure the same evening! There was one more case of CSF leak where a radioactive agent was injected into the sub-arachnoid space through a lumbar puncture and the patient was imaged at specific time points (was similar to the pulse-chase study) to determine the leak.
The first patient for the clincial trial that I mentioned in my previous post got pushed back to Jul 11th and I would be imaging some phantom prostates next week using PET scan to figure out the protocol. Also, I am excited about being in the emergency ICU next week on Monday! I have also been in and out of OR watching tumor resection by Dr. Douglas Scherr. In bladder cancer patients bladder is removed and then a part of their intestine is used to construct an new bladder and the procedure is called neo-bladder reconstruction. It is a time consuming and a lengthy process and Dr. Douglass Scherr told how Biomedical Engineers can fit in here helping them in designning artificial/tissue engineered biocompatible bladders. Though I am not a tissue engineering person, I realized how someone from Dr. Bonassar's lab could think about a part of their thesis research using their bioprinting process just by being in this OR. I think that this opportunity could for BME students is enriching and could help in fostering a lot of collaborative work that could lead to translational research moving from the bench-side to bed-side.
The first patient for the clincial trial that I mentioned in my previous post got pushed back to Jul 11th and I would be imaging some phantom prostates next week using PET scan to figure out the protocol. Also, I am excited about being in the emergency ICU next week on Monday! I have also been in and out of OR watching tumor resection by Dr. Douglas Scherr. In bladder cancer patients bladder is removed and then a part of their intestine is used to construct an new bladder and the procedure is called neo-bladder reconstruction. It is a time consuming and a lengthy process and Dr. Douglass Scherr told how Biomedical Engineers can fit in here helping them in designning artificial/tissue engineered biocompatible bladders. Though I am not a tissue engineering person, I realized how someone from Dr. Bonassar's lab could think about a part of their thesis research using their bioprinting process just by being in this OR. I think that this opportunity could for BME students is enriching and could help in fostering a lot of collaborative work that could lead to translational research moving from the bench-side to bed-side.
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