Week 3

This week will probably be my most unusual during Immersion. I was in the city on Monday and worked to finalize the dataset for the manuscript that the lab is working to submit. I was able to fill out the dataset and make sure that it was ready for statistical analysis. At the end of the day I got one the bus and went back to Ithaca to run our labs 4-H career outreach program for high schoolers.

For the outreach program we ran a variety of activities and lectures that were intended to teach the students about what cardiac engineering is and the kinds of things that we do in the lab. I had been helping to organize the activities leading up until this week and I was also developing new activities that I would run when I returned to Ithaca. My activities were mechanical testing and development of bioinks. For the mechanical testing, I cut pieces of pig hearts that we were using for dissection into rectangles. I had the students test valve leaftlets, aortic sections, and myocardium. The myocardium tore for almost each group and they didn't like that very much, but the leaflet and aortic sections stretched well. They were able to get data points but I don't think they quite understood the purpose of the testing. I will probably try to further develop this activity and reuse it in future years.

The other activity that I ran was making bioinks similar to the ones that I use in the bioprinter for my research. I think they enjoyed messing around with the crosslinkable materials, but again, it took a lot of explaining to get them to understand why I was having them make it. Overall, I enjoyed the program and felt like the students enjoyed it and learned a lot. I took the bus back to the city on Thursday night.

Friday, I was able to help start doing the statistical analysis on the patient data. This came with some issues because I needed to take out outliers. I was able to have the fellow work with me to show me the echocardiograms of the outlier patients. They had unusually large values for heart measurements and we wanted to see if they were typos or if they actually were as large as their reports said. It turns out they were all true values and it was a good teaching lesson for me because I would have assumed that they were false values. The pathologies that those patients were suffering from was a good clinical lesson and I definitely learned more about the limits of the human heart.