Week 5 - Stevenson T

My mentor had this week off. As a result, it was up to me to fill my time in a meaningful way. Luckily, I’ve been at the hospital long enough to know my way around, and I knew how to get involved in interesting things. Another piece of sage advice for future BME immersion students: don’t be shy. Usually people are pretty nice when you tell them you’re interested in their work, and if they aren’t, just go find someone else.

The Big Meeting: My mentor had scheduled a meeting for this Tuesday afternoon with a couple of his collaborators and their assistants. When he scheduled the meeting, I think he forgot he was going to be out of town. So, during one of our previous discussions, Dr. Osborne informed me that it would be my responsibility to “run the meeting.” I was more than a little nervous about this responsibility as the purpose of the meeting was for Dr. Osborne to present the collected/accumulated data to his collaborators and summarize the results so that a future direction could be planned. So instead of having a knowledgeable nuclear chemist attending physician present the data, it fell to me, a first year BME student who still referred to directions in the body as “top”, “down”, “back”,”front”(as opposed to cephalic, caudal, poseterior, anterior). Anyway, I had been familiarizing myself with the patient data for a week or so and I had been in the reading room with actual nuclear medicine residents, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The meeting turned out ok, though I did spend a great deal of time giving an unplanned explanation of the differences between SPECT and PET. The rather simple explanations I gave were enough to boost my credibility with the collaborators that the rest of the meeting went rather smoothly, and we were able to come to the conclusion that changing images schemes from SPECT to PET would be very beneficial to the project.

DaVinci Robotic Prostatectomy: I know we are supposed to attend these procedures with very dynamic mindset, asking questions of the physicians and formulating new research questions of our own, but sometimes you're just a bit stunned by what you see and are "along for the ride." The DaVinci robot assisted prostatectomy procedure is most certainly one of these awesome experiences. In the hands of an experienced surgeon like Dr. Scherr, the movement of the robot manipulator arms looks much like the natural movements of a surgeon during an open procedure. Through the slightly tinted views of my 3D glasses, I was able to see Dr. Scherr tie surgical knots using the robotic manipulator arms within the patient. I know robotic assisted procedures have been around for several years, but I never understood the ease with which we've ergonomically designed the controls for use by surgeons. In spite of all it's elegance, I've learned that these robotic assisted procedures don't really have significantly better outcomes than open prostatectomies. The real draw of performing these procedures is reducing the total hospitalization time for each patient, saving the hospital a significant amount of money for each procedure. This dry economic explanation for this procedure has somewhat lessened the overall experience of watching the surgery, but it was a good reminder that every designed instrument, no matter how scientifically appealing or "neat", must impact the bottom line of a hospital for it get accepted and used in any kind of meaningful way.