Week 5

This week was about finalizing my analysis of tissue expander phantoms and patients for today's presentation. I have all my measures for chest wall compression and sternum angle deflection for 35 tissue expander patients and 53 implant patients. From my data looks like there is a significant amount of chest wall compression on the right side of tissue expander patients, which can suggest that the heart might be preventing the chest to be compressed on the left side. Also, the sternum deforms a lot on tissue expander patients, specially those with unilateral implant. On the phantom side, our experiments with altering the parameters suggest that bandwidth plays an important role in decreasing artifact and preventing the image from deforming. If bandwidth is increased, the amount of deformity changes drastically. I have also seen that the slice thickness (the greater the better) and the size of the frequency encoding matrix helps a lot with resolution. Hopefully next week I can start to image the real expanders ex vivo and compare them with my phantoms. We would like to keep optimizing out parameters to get great images of the chest wall. Unfortunately we didn't had any tissue expander patients this week to try our new imaging protocol. Hopefully next week we can have some.  We plan to meet with our collaborating surgeon, Dr Joshua Levine, to see patients records and establish which of our patients had tissue expander and then had an implant, to see if the chest wall compression reverts. Besides the routine of this week I got to see a really cool surgery of Dr. Spector with Brittany Schutrum. It consisted on reconstructing the face of a young boy that had scar burns. They inserted tissue expanders on the neck to expand the tissue in order to lift the skin and cover the scars. Surgeons made an incision through the cheek, around the inferior lip and crossing the other cheek, removed the scar tissue and then removed the tissue expanders. Then they lifted the skin up and sutured carefully to prevent the skin of falling off or stretching. It was a pretty though surgery that lasted around 5 hours, but very interesting to watch. Dr. Spector also interacted with us and showed us what he was doing throughout the surgery. I would love to see a similar surgery but with tissue expanders in the breast since this is the project that I've been working on. I hope that I can make it happen before immersion is over. Time has gone by so quickly!
On the fun side I went to the Met with my family and we have also explored the city and its amazing food. We also went to an escape room with my friends and it was so exciting and fun! The name was: the clock tower and the theme was about time. We had to solve puzzles in order to get out of the room. Highly recommended for those who like puzzles and riddles!