Week 3: Justin Levine

 It is the third week of our summer immersion program, and we are fully in the swing of things. This week, in addition to clinical shadowing and viewing the most intense surgical operation so far, I also completed a promising pilot study in the lab.


Seeing patients in the clinic remains my favorite part of shadowing Dr. Spector, as I get to see patients work with their caregiver to decide on a best course of action or, alternatively, discuss the healing process that follows a successful operation. In addition to consultations and post-operation checkups, this week I also attended an in-office procedure to remove a benign lump from a patient’s upper abdomen, performed under local anesthesia. I chatted with the very friendly patient throughout the operation and, beyond finding that we both attended the same university and have family in the same town, I think our conversation helped this patient take their mind off the ongoing procedure. The human side of medical work that comes with attending to (conscious) patients really engages me, and I understand how fulfilling it must be for medical professionals day in and day out.


While I just stated a preference for the clinic, this week’s case in the OR was by no means uninteresting - in fact, it was probably the most engaging and relevant to biomedical engineering of all the cases we have seen so far. A patient with a benign but expanding cyst in the jaw had to have a large portion of the jawbone removed to stop the cyst from growing to the point of destroying the jaw, but in the very same procedure the fibula was removed and, working with a representative from a major bioengineering company, shaped into a jaw implant and attached where the jawbone section had just been removed. This was an all-day operation, involving a large team of surgeons working together with a patient-specific mold to remove and shape the fibula before grafting the new section of jaw into its place on the head. Beyond witnessing this all expertly performed, I really enjoyed speaking with the company’s representative and learning more about industry working with and in the clinic.


I ended the week with lab work, attempting a pilot run performing immunofluorescence staining on primary human adipose tissue from the Spector Lab’s biobank. I achieved a mediocre stain overall, which was to be expected as the protocol I used is very much a work in progress, and I have identified two major areas for improvement: sample digestion (I plan on adding collagenase to my digestion solution in subsequent runs) and stain and wash aspiration (I plan on shifting from more standard staining methods of depositing then aspirating stain and wash solutions to wrapping samples in dialysis tubing, then transferring the sample between wells containing various solutions). It was a promising run, and I am optimistic about further iterations of the protocol that I plan to attempt next week.


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