Week 2: First time watching brain surgery

This week Dr. Prince was in Paris during ISRMM. I had a couple of images I needed to analyze - calculate the volume of chest that is being pushed inside by the tissue expander- this is easy to do with a program called Volume Viewer (General Electric). I manually segment the volume of chest from MRI images and compare it to the other side of the chest (left or right). I was able to analyze 12 patients and other 16 patients with breast implants. I also had to do some phantom experiments on the MRI, and I must confess, I was pretty scared to handle that machine by myself. Is quite overwhelming and it has thousands of parameters that need to be modified in order to acquire a specific type of image.
Since the machine was busy with patients during the whole day, I was only able to access it around 6pm. I would put the tissue expander phantom on the machine and play with the acquisition parameters in order to reduce the artifact caused by the magnet inside the expander. I honestly was very confused of what I was doing (in term of the parameters) and even though I acquired some data and tried to explore by myself how the machine works, I still need another session with Dr. Prince to  feel confident.
Besides of that, I was able to shadow Dr. Schwartz on brain surgery on Wednesday. I'm very interested in this type of surgery since I do it all the time back in Ithaca (on mice, obviously) so I was very curious to find out how it was in human. That day, Dr. Schwartz was operating a lady that had brain tumor near the pituitary gland, so he needed to extract the tumor through the nose. That was pretty impressive! But definitely a very good experience, I'm glad I had the chance. Hopefully I can shadow other type of surgeries from my friends from now on.
On the fun side, I have kept exploring NYC and went to a jazz bar on Thursday night (Smalls bar) definitely recommended for those jazz lovers.