This week has mostly been an effort to finalize the data to present in the mitral regurgitation and exercise tolerance manuscript. The data show that patients with functional MR have a lower exercise tolerance than patients with degenerative MR. Patients that have both types achieve even lower exercise times.
The work that was done this week was to attempt to classify the patients who are currently lumped into the idiopathic category, where they did not originally fall into one of the three categories based on the original classification methods. I have been reviewing echocardiograms with both a cardiology fellow and a radiology fellow in order to try to see if there are any obvious indications of one of the two etiologies.
One of the other main tasks that I have been working on is creating the figures for the manuscript. I have never had to do this before and I never realized the amount of time that has to go into creating clean, and consistent figures. I have been working on these in powerpoint and excel and I am realizing why people like software such as Prism for creating nice figures without needing to draw in certain things like p-value indicators.
On the clinical side I have been sitting in on cardiac fellow conferences to try to learn a little more about the procedures that they use and the biomedical devices that they learn about. It has been interesting to see the kinds of things that are important to them and how they approach certain conditions. I have also been reading MRIs with Dr. Weinsaft and have seen a few very interesting cases, including a congenital defect where the patient didn't have a right ventricle and so their vessels were reconstructed to create a system that would create enough pressure to deliver blood to both the systemic and pulmonary systems with only a left ventricle.
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