Clinical Immersion Week Two
Garrett Beeghly
During the second week of my clinical immersion term with Dr. Jason Spector in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, I continued to interact with patients in the clinic, observe surgeries in the operating room, and advance my summer research project in the lab. In clinic, we monitored a patient who sustained severe trauma to his leg in an accident. Thankfully, his sciatic nerve was undamaged and amputation was able to be avoided as a result. To date, he has undergone 19 surgeries to repair the damage to his leg. In addition to orthopedic operations, Dr. Spector has performed multiple surgeries to transfer muscle flaps and skin grafts from his healthy leg to his injured leg. These procedures will help rehabilitate his injured leg in combination with extensive physical therapy over the coming months. Other cases in clinic included debriding an infected ACL repair and draining fluid from the amputation site of a patient with a hip disarticulation.
In the operating room, we observed an inguinal hernia repair that involved placing a synthetic mesh above a weakened region of the abdominal wall. This surgery was the first laparoscopic procedure we shadowed. The equipment needed to perform the operation laparoscopically, including a harmonic scalpel that could cut and cauterize tissue simultaneously, underscored the role of engineers in enabling new minimally invasive procedures. In the lab, I continued work on my clinical research project. Below, you can see pieces of fresh adipose tissue isolated from an abdominoplasty performed by Dr. Spector. Most of the samples were dedicated for decellularization in order to isolate matrix proteins and biochemical factors of interest for use in tissue-engineered models of breast cancer. However, I also fixed a small number of fresh tissue pieces for paraffin embedding and sectioning in the Weill Cornell Medicine Histology Core. These samples will be used to assess differences in adipose tissue composition and structure between women of different demographics and to serve as points of comparison for the decellularized samples.
In my free time, I walked the High Line, queued for a NY bagel, and had drinks on the Hudson. I also attended a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with rest of Spector Lab led by our very own Alice Harper. The tour ended with the lab grabbing drinks on the roof. I’m looking forward to another week with my fellow BME trainees Emily and Leigh!
In the operating room, we observed an inguinal hernia repair that involved placing a synthetic mesh above a weakened region of the abdominal wall. This surgery was the first laparoscopic procedure we shadowed. The equipment needed to perform the operation laparoscopically, including a harmonic scalpel that could cut and cauterize tissue simultaneously, underscored the role of engineers in enabling new minimally invasive procedures. In the lab, I continued work on my clinical research project. Below, you can see pieces of fresh adipose tissue isolated from an abdominoplasty performed by Dr. Spector. Most of the samples were dedicated for decellularization in order to isolate matrix proteins and biochemical factors of interest for use in tissue-engineered models of breast cancer. However, I also fixed a small number of fresh tissue pieces for paraffin embedding and sectioning in the Weill Cornell Medicine Histology Core. These samples will be used to assess differences in adipose tissue composition and structure between women of different demographics and to serve as points of comparison for the decellularized samples.
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| Freshly isolated human adipose tissue from an abdominoplasty prior to decellularization. |
In my free time, I walked the High Line, queued for a NY bagel, and had drinks on the Hudson. I also attended a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with rest of Spector Lab led by our very own Alice Harper. The tour ended with the lab grabbing drinks on the roof. I’m looking forward to another week with my fellow BME trainees Emily and Leigh!
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| The BME Spector trainees with mango margaritas on the roof of the Met. |
Look at you guys enjoying the city! Glad you are getting plugged into the lab.
ReplyDeleteIt's also so cool that you are starting decell, but also get to see the contributions to a large bank of data trying to understand adipose tissue across multiple factors such as age and other demographics. I feel like I usually don't think to look for those types of trends, or, run out of time. Hospitals really foster those kinds of longitudinal studies!