Week 4 - Stevenson T

This week started with the 4^th of July holiday and a spectacular Fireworks display over the Hudson River. If anyone in future BME classes actually reads this blog, I would suggest that they use this week as a “bookwork” week. If there is any thesis related work, travel, or sight-seeing you want to get done, this is the week to do it. Even though the holiday is only one day, it throws off the scheduling in the hospital pretty drastically. Additionally, many physicians and surgeons take off this week, making finding interesting procedures even more difficult. As a result, I spent most of this week working on my research project.

Collecting/Compiling Data: This week I began collecting patient data for one of the clinical imaging studies my mentor was overseeing. This particular study involved imaging prostate cancer using and an indium antibody SPECT tracer. Patients with high grade prostate cancer (as measured by gleason score and change in PSA levels) were injected with the indium labeled antibody 3 days prior to robotic prostatectomy. On the day of surgery, patient underwent wholebody SPECT/CT imaging. Patients then went to surgery for robotic prostatectomy. Interestingly, the ex vivo prostate specimens were imaged using a “gamma camera” approach (i.e. planar imaging of gamma rays), allowing for better imaging of activity within the gland to which the radiotracer was targeted. Compiling a database of the patients information as well as imaging results was pretty simple but time consuming. There was a lot of copy-pasting, asking other to log me into secure databases, taking screenshots of radiological reports, more copy pasting...you get the idea. I then had was tasked with summarizing the info and putting it into a powerpoint to present to the collaborating surgeon and biochemists.

PET Disassembly: Friday I got the rare opportunity to see a clinical PET/CT get disassembled. The Citigroup Biological Imaging Center was having their old PET scanner (ca. 2001) replaced with a newer one capable of higher resolution, quicker scans. Seeing the machine in different stages of disassembly really gave me insight into its operation. For instance, the machinery for PET imaging is completely separate from the CT machinery. In retrospect, this makes sense as the CT cameras require xray emitter, and the whole system has to spin around the patient while the PET cameras are simply measuring the activity of radiation within a patient, but they need to measure simultaneous incident, requiring complete circular coverage around a patient.