Week 6

This week we finally got the chance to meet with Dr. Levine, our surgeon collaborator and one of his surgeon residents. We made a plan about the tissue expander project, consisting on their side recollecting data from each case and determining the cases that had tissue expander in the past and now have implants or flap reconstruction to see if the chest wall compression gets better after the expanders have been removed. They showed great enthusiasm for our new improved imaging parameters, which let us see the chest wall better. Even though our parameters help a lot, they still need to be refined. We got a case on Thursday in which the imaging didn't go so well. I've been also digging through papers about how to quantify the amount of metal artifact in a phantom image. I shout an email to Dr. Sarah Eskreis-Winkler, who works on Yi Wang's lab on this particular subject hoping to get some help from her. Hope I can meet with her on the next weekend.
I also calculated the amount of volume in each tissue expander case and see if it correlates with the amount of chest depression. Until now we do have a correlation, although tiny, in which the most depression occurs when the expander is filled the most. We still need more data if we want our correlation to be stronger.
We also noticed from our images that some patients with implants had inflammation of the chest wall after having implants, and we would like to see if this was due to the expanders or not. So this week I'm planning to go through all the records and see how many patients had the inflammation as a consequence from tissue expanders, which is a very interesting thing to report. 
On Friday we went to a tour of the CITI biomedical imaging center on 72nd st. Dr. Douglas Ballon gave us the tour and it was so amazing! He showed us the MRIs that they use in there (they actually have one 7T but only for animal use), the CT scans, PET, ultrasound and the cyclotron they use to produce the positrons for PET. I was quite amazed by the high technology and resources that are being used in that center, and the high quality research that is being produced in there. He showed us the facilities and taught us the physics behind the machines in such an understandable and easy way! We definitely loved the experience and we would like to go back in the future to see a MRgFUS (MR guided Focused Ultrasound) which is a technology only available at this center to cure essential tremor.

This is me, holding an "imaginary dog"