Week 4 - Nathaniel Wright

Each week while it seems similar, each is a chance to continue learning about echo and practicing measuring strain on Tomtek. This past week was no exception as I have continued to work on strain measurements. Additionally, I have begun to look at the Mitraclip which is used in surgeries to lower mitral valve regurgitation. This study is being performed with 2D echo and 3D echo so the studies must first be selected from a pool of patients. This is being done by verifying that the studies have both types of echos to needed to analyze the data.

Mitraclip is a device that is inserted percutaneously into the heart and then clips onto the leaflets of the mitral valve. While this seems advantageous over open heart surgery every time, it does not completely solve the mitral regurgitation like an artificial valve. Additionally, it can fail after a time which requires a surgery as well. This does provide a solution to those who have mitral regurgitation that is severe but cannot undergo surgery.

One of the procedures that I was able to see recently was cardiac ablation. When arrhythmias in the heart are detected there are a few options to treat them, one of the treatments is ablation. This is another catheter procedure that has the device placed in the heart to burn parts of the heart. In this case, parts of the heart are burned in order to stop the arrhythmia generation. One of the fascinating parts of the procedure was the mapping of the electrical conduction of the heart to generate a map of how the signal is moved around the heart. This allows for a prediction to be made about which part of the heart should be ablated to isolate the arrhythmia. This procedure while unfortunate shows the benefit of biomedical engineering in these treatments. The ability to tell how a signal is moving around the heart is very useful. It allows for less parts of the heart to be ablated, for the loops to be more accurately located and destroyed. I enjoyed watching the procedure and the work that was done by the EP physicians.