Week 1- Chia-Wei Yeh

This is the first week of the summer immersion. The summer immersion program is one of the reason for me to choose Cornell Biomedical Engineering program as my graduate study. We will immerse in the hospital setting for 6 weeks, and have the opportunity to find out the gap between engineering and clinic. In Weill Cornell Medical Center, I will be working with Dr. Jonathan W. Weinsaft, who is a cardiologist specialize in nuclear cardiology. I expect to learn the knowledge of cardiology from physician's perspective, and explore the point of view about cooperation among academia, hospital, and industry to solve clinical unmet need from different department in hospital. 

In the beginning of this week, I participated several image reading sections with attending physician and residency, including nuclear images and echo images (ultrasound images). One interesting case was a patient with left ventricular assist device (LVAD). LVAD is a device that assist cardiac circulation, and patient can maintain proper cardiac function before the heart transplantation. From the echo images, there was a special signal comes from LAVD, and the EKG was different from normal heart. Although I am not very familiar with the echocardiaography, I am so impressed that experienced attending physician can tell so many information from the echo images. On the other hand, attending physician always used both of kind and rigorous way to teach residency, which is a very effective way for residency to learn from mistake. 

Another interesting event in this week was I attended the cardiac catheterization procedure. In this case, the patient has left atrium fibrillation, and the physician suspected that there is an unusual spot in pulmonary vein that fire the signal to left atrium. The purpose of this procedure is using catheter to ablate small part of cardiac tissue to resume normal electrical conduction in the heart. This procedure requires technician to guide physician to place catheter to the right place. There are two type of ablation, one is using radiofrequency ablation, the second one is using ballon cryoablation, and it depends on the area of targeted tissue. Typically, balloon cryoablation can ablate large area at one time, and radiofrequency ablation can precisely ablate the tissue point by point. In this case, because of ballon cryoablation cannot effectively block the unusual electrical signal conduction from pulmonary vein to left atrium, the physician used radio frequency ablation to further block the unusual conduction point by point afterward, as shown in the red ball in the following picture. 

In my free time, I really enjoyed running in Central Park. There are so many different running routes that allow runner to explore different part of Central Park. I also visited Guggenhem Museum during the Museum Festival. I am really excited to learn more from different physician in different department and explore this city in the coming weeks.