Week 4: Brenda

This week I with Christina, one of the lab techs between Dr. Carli and Dr. Bostrom. We prepared screws that have biofilm on them for SEM at NYU. These are screws used on both hip and knee implants and we are trying to see the effects of different cleaning methods on removing biofilm from implant materials. Since the preparation and transportation to NYU took a while, I was not able to attend the clinic with Dr. Carli as per usual. I really enjoyed our weekly meeting given by Dr. Mert Sabuncu, as it is closely related to my PhD research back in Ithaca (in the way that it involves image segmentation and training models). I love the idea of translational research from anatomy to knowledge at different length scales. I learned so much about missing data and what to do, this is an area that I have been exposed to and now I understand an option of what to do. 

I attended the OR with Dr. Carli basically all day on Wednesday (6/25). Here is list of the surgical operations I saw:

1. total hip replacement - posterior left
2. replacement total hip - posterior - mako robotics right
3. arthrotomy knee osteochondral allograft with fresh articular cartilage left MFC
4. left hip replacement total hip posterior mako robotics

I got the see the implementation of mako robotics in the operating room, this technique is used in special cases where precision is required. Here is a definition of it: "Mako surgery involves using a Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopaedic System, known as RIO. This surgeon-controlled robotic arm helps surgeons get a patient-specific image and more precisely place and align the implants used in joint replacement surgery.". I always heard so much about this technique from fellow colleagues, but seeing it in person was amazing. The 3rd surgical operation was actually performed by Dr. Sabrina Strickland, my colleague (Salman) who collects the knees samples used in both of our PhD projects was actually picking up a sample and invited me to this operation. On Thursday I attended a talk given by Dr. Denise Howard on advancing woman's health. Throughout the rest of the day and on Friday I planned the rest of my experiments being done this summer. As I am working with bacteria, I need to plan out days to culture, seed, and clean my tibial base implants.