Week 3 - Chase Webb

            This week was quite similar to the previous ones, with some conferences as highlights. I spent time with Dr. Kim in the clinic and watched more TEE’s and cath lab procedures. One of my days in the cath lab was quite eventful, with two TAVRs and a mitral valve in valve replacement happening in one day. I also got to see Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) get used for the first time. IVUS is used to visualize the inside of a blood vessel, allowing interventional cardiologists to map legions in blood vessels. One fun thing to see was since this is the last week for some of the fellows, they were celebrating after their final procedure at Weill Cornell and taking pictures with the attendings they’ve worked under for the last three years. In the clinic, most of the patients were similar to the ones we had seen previously. Patients with Afib, high blood pressure, etc. The TEE’s were interesting, with one patient having an atrial septal defect (ASD) a hole in the wall of the atrial septum formed by the incomplete joining of two pieces of tissue during development. This is different from a PFO in that a PFO has the growth of these pieces of tissue without them joining, while with an ASD the tissue never grows enough to touch. ASDs are easily observed with Doppler US and bubble studies on TEE.

            The two conferences I went to with the cardiology fellows were quite interesting. The first was an introduction by Dr. Mick, a new cardiothoracic surgeon who specializes in minimally invasive procedures, gave a talk on minimally invasive mitral valve repair. This included the use of the da Vinci robot. Being able to her how she feels about interfacing with the robot and the tactile response she gets just from visual cues provided a unique perspective that I had not heard with the use of these devices. The second conference was about imaging the right ventricle. This talk was actually surprisingly useful for my work back in Ithaca, since I will need to image goldfish hearts for my experiments. Dr. Jiwon Kim talked about different imaging modalities and measures of function, as well as issues that arise from looking at the right ventricle specifically.