Week 4- Iqra Sajid

I had the opportunity to observe a hernia repair surgery, and it was a very interesting experience! It was especially exciting to watch how the clinicians and residents used the robotic system during the procedure. They were able to guide the instruments through the scopes with a lot of control and precision.

The patient undergoing this procedure had previously experienced an aortic aneurysm. Because of that, the stitches from an earlier surgery were not tight enough, which created small gaps. Over time, parts of the bowel became stuck in these gaps, leading to many adhesions. During the surgery, the clinician had to carefully cut through these adhesions to free the bowel. Watching this process made me realize how complex these cases can be and how much attention to detail is required.

I also learned something new about the materials used in surgery. After removing the adhesions, the surgical team placed a mesh to prevent the bowel from sticking again in the future. I had originally assumed that this mesh would break down over time, like many types of stitches do. However, I learned that the mesh used in this case is not degradable and is meant to stay in the body permanently to provide long-term support. This was surprising to me and helped me better understand the different tools and materials used during procedures.

In addition to observing the surgery, I spent a large part of my time working on case-related tasks. This included finding pressure information for cases in Pruka and downloading case data from the CARTO system. While these tasks were not difficult, they required a lot of time because there were over 600 cases to go through. Even though the work was repetitive, it gave me a better understanding of how clinical data is organized and managed behind the scenes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3: Eddie Wei - Multimodal Endoscope

Image
Figure 1: Multimodal OCT and Confocal Setup Housed in moving cart connected to Endoscope for operations Endoscope Design           This week, I finalized the optical setup and handheld endoscopic probe design in SolidWorks CAD for multimodal imaging with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Confocal Microscopy in both 360° side-view scanning and forward-view orientations, as shown in the setup and endoscope CAD figures above. Figure 2: Current OCT-Red ( Freund et al.)  and Confocal Fluorescence Microscopy-Green ( Wang et al. ) images in comparison to Histology.           As a brief review of their demonstrated applications in urology, OCT uses backscattered near-infrared light to generate depth-resolved structural images and can delineate bladder layers up to the muscularis with limited cellular information [1], while confocal fluorescence endoscopy uses fluorescein-induced emission and optical sectioning to distinguish...
Read more

Week One: Eddie Wei

Over the first week of immersion, I had the opportunity to observe a couple standard urologic operating room procedures, each offering a different perspective on diagnosis, imaging, and operative care. On June 1, I observed two standard operating room procedures. The first involved the treatment of four urinary bladder stones using a cystoscope inserted through the male urethra. The cystoscope was first equipped with a specialized head capable of generating a stream of water to break down the stones. After fragmentation, the water head was replaced with a suction tube to remove the stone fragments and excessive water from the water jet. The procedure was performed under direct real time visualization with a  standard 3x magnification camera integrated into the cystoscope. This procedure lasted 2-3 hours, with 2 and a half hours allocated to breaking down these stones using the water jet.  The second procedure involved a female patient undergoing blue-light cystoscopy to evalua...
Read more

Week 1- iqra

This week started off pretty slow since I didn’t meet with my clinician until Wednesday, but things picked up quick ly after that. One thing that has made a big difference is that Dr. Cheung sent an email out to the department about me shadowing, which has allowed me to move around and observe a variety of electrophysiology procedures rather than being limited to a single physician or case type. This has given me exposure to many different aspects of the field and has helped me gain a broader understanding of cardiac electrophysiology. In addition to clinical observations, I also met with one of the medical students working on my research project. During our meeting, we discussed some of the technical details and logistics of the project and worked through a few questions regarding the overall direction of the research. We are still in the early stages of planning, so there are additional details that need to be worked out, and we plan to continue those discussions next week. On Wednes...
Read more