This week has mainly been working on my OsiriX project. I've polished my skills with some youtube videos and now have a somewhat solid grasp of the program, at least for my purposes. I've hit a snag in my work, though, with more recent patient files. Many of the older patients are having new back problems, and so they get new scans. Hence the purpose of this study, examining patients with previous fusion surgery that are having recurrent pain. This makes it very easy to see the pedicle screws and other hardware that I use as landmarks for my volume measurements. However, in the newer patients, they do not always have the best CT scans for my purposes, as many of them are taken mid-operation. This makes it harder and sometimes not feasible to take the measurements that I need. So I've been trying to stick to less recent patients so that I can get the most work done possible.
I was also able to help out on a smaller part of the intervertebral disc project with the sheep spines I have been processing. We took them out of the nitric acid and used a razor blade to cut through the entire segment and isolate the piece of sample that has the damaged part. The blades dull extremely fast so it is hard to get such tiny slices. But I did some of the less-vital sample segments and let the more experienced fellows do the more important segments.
No comments:
Post a Comment