Week 1: Anuj

 

The first week of my summer immersion has been busy but quite extraordinary in the hospital. My clinical mentor is Dr. Douglas S. Scherr, the Clinical Director of Urologic Oncology of Weill Cornell Medicine. This week, I shadowed Dr. Scherr on clinical visits, observed procedures such as cystoscopy (visualization of the inner urinary bladder using a small-flexible pipe with a tiny camera), and shadowed his team performing surgeries. These surgeries included nephrectomy (kidney removal), prostatectomy (prostate removal), and cystectomy with ureteroileal conduit creation (removing the urinary bladder and connecting the ureters directly to the small intestine!). The main highlight was that these surgeries were performed using robotic arms controlled remotely by Dr. Scherr!

Similarly, Dr. Scherr is keen on working with technologies advancing the medical field. Back in 2010, he worked with my PhD advisor (Dr. Chris Xu) and Dr. Watt Webb (Dr. Xu’s PhD advisor) to patent the world’s first multi-photon endoscopy. For my summer project, Dr. Scherr shared some clinical challenges involving the current cystoscopy camera having a limited probe angle (0, 30, and 70 degrees), which requires constant rotation of the probes inside the bladder to visualize all sides clearly (Figure 1). The constant rotation and movement increase friction between the cystoscopy pipe and the urethral wall, which increases discomfort to patients. I will be working with Dr.Scherr to design a wide-FOV cystoscope to visualize the entire urinary bladder at once by minimizing movements of the scope. 

Figure 1. Tip-point angle of a cystoscope. This is the angle between the probe's direction and the center of the light field-of-view.