Week 7 - Stevenson T

This is the last week of our seven week long summer immersions term at Weill Cornell Medical college. I’m going to spend a little time discussing my overall experience before getting to specifically what I accomplished this week. After seven weeks of “city living” in Manhattan, my wallet, waistline, and personal space are going to be very happy heading back to Ithaca. Though, I consider Cornell’s main campus to be a more comfortable location, I will miss working at the hospital. Though we didn’t actually get to “help” patients directly, being in the hospital made me feel much closer to the ultimate goal of biomedical engineering which is improving patient diagnosis, treatment, and quality of life. In Ithaca, we are much further removed from the actually application of our research that I sometimes lose sight of this “ultimate goal”.Interacting with the patients and their physicians left a lasting impression on me.

On a more research oriented side of things, following Dr. Osborne through several of his clinical rounds and studies, I was able to get a basic understanding of a variety of nuclear medicine techniques that may one day prove valuable to my thesis work. I use words like “may” and “one day” to emphasize the point I made in my previous paragraph. The work we are doing at the Ithaca main campus is sooooo far away from practical application that the techniques and imaging methods I learned would only possibly be useful after 3-4 of research. That may be because I’m a molecular engineer, but I feel that a lot of ground work in design, and in vitrotesting must be performed before a biomedical researcher can even go as far as animal testing.Overall, I’d give the experience a B+. The program did accomplish the goal of “teaching me how clinicians think”, but the overall contribution to my thesis will be minimal. My only advice for future years is to pair up students/clinicians much earlier so that they (+/- the student’s PI at Ithaca) can set up a schedule that will not only familiarize the student with clinical practices, but get them involved in a project that may contribute the student’s PhD thesis.

Orienting a model of an ex vivo prostate specimen (aka arts and crafts): As I have mentioned in my previous blog entries, the research project I’m involved in is trying to use¹¹¹indium labeled antibodies for imaging of prostate cancer. Specifically, we’re trying to determine if we can localize the disease within the prostate. Patients are injected with indium labeled antibody 2 days prior to prostatectomy, and then imaged using SPECT. An “extra step” in this study which usually isn’t performed in similar studies, is imaging of the prostate after it’s been removed. We (that is the nuclear medicine dept) get the prostate and put it on the same SPECT scanner on which the patients were previously imaged. One problem that radiologists ran into is that they weren’t able to orient the 3D activity map to an subsection of the prostate. On a clinical scanner with limited resolution, the ex vivo prostate looks like a spherical blob. This is usually ok when the prostate is being imaged inside of a patient, when the radiologist reading the image has physiological “landmarks” (bladder, rectum, etc.) to orient his view of the prostate. In an ex vivo specimen, these landmarks do not exist. So in an attempt to have the image 3D activity image of the prostate oriented, I tested several metallic paints as possible contrast agents that could easily mark the prostate, providing a coordinate system to describe observed regions of activity as well as allowing the radiologist to say the activity is posterior, anterior, cephalic, etc. The image I have in included shows several types of fruits that I painted with candidate contrast agents including aluminum, brass, and stainless steel. Unfortunately, none of the paints were dense enough to show up on a X-ray CT scan. It was then that Dr. Osborne got the idea to use barium paste, an X-ray contrast agent present in the hospital. Marking the fruit, specifically the tomato, with even the smallest drops of the paste provided sufficient contrast to see on the CT scan, allowing for proper orientation, and the development of a coordinate system.