Week 7: Smrithi Karthikeyan

 This week was one of my favorite weeks of immersion; I got to do research and shadow two different physicians outside of cardiology! Starting with shadowing, on Monday, I had the pleasure of shadowing Dr. Arzu Kovanlikaya in Pediatric Radiology. Here, I got to see her and her residents read through a few abdominal echo and X-rays. With pediatric patients, reading echos is difficult as the patients move around a lot and bowel gas is high (especially with patients between 0-2). X-ray imaging is the preferred modality as it is quick, and can usually give radiologists an idea of lung and bone pathologies quickly. After watching them read scans, I got a chance to see a voiding cystourethrogram on a two-year-old patient. This patient had a history of recurrent urinary tract infections, which prompted her physician to order this test to see if there is any urine backflow to the kidneys. After catheterization and contrast injection, successive X-rays were taken to see the bladder fill with urine and to check for backflow. I was surprised to see how big the bladder can get - it really can stretch!

On Wednesday, I got a chance to shadow Dr. Yale Fisher at the Department of Ophthalmology. Dr. Fisher is an expert in ophthalmic ultrasound, and he was kind enough to give me a lecture on how ultrasound works and how he uses it for ophthalmic applications. I got a chance to see and use a few of the imaging modalities at the clinic (both the Absolu 20 MHz ultrasound probe and a slit lamp). In addition, I got to see a patient's cataract using the slit lamp myself! Overall, my main takeaway is that ophthalmic ultrasound is great for viewing structures in the posterior segment of the eye - more than any other imaging modality as it does not need light to generate an image! However, it is really tricky to position the probe correctly and then read the images - hence why it is not used more ubiquitously in clinic today. 

For the remainder of the week, I was focused on entering patient EHR data for my calcification project. Our next step is to select matched controls for the calcification group. In addition, I have been working on a literature review comparing QSM and T2 Mapping for measuring blood oxygenation. On Friday, my main priority was completing aorta segmentations to train a segmentation model. 

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