Clinical Immersion - Week I

Greetings,

I am Victor Aguilar, a biomedical engineering doctoral student participating at the Weill Cornell Medical College clinical immersion program. I will be documenting my progress as a tyro student researcher at the clinical level.

For the first week, I was mostly daunted by the amount of training and security going into preparing clinical researchers for access to facilities as well as medical records. It shows the great care with which society expects us to carry out our work and the expected level of professionalism required from each of us as clinical researchers. After all the appropriate training and security clearance, I have been trusted into joining this cohort of professional researchers.

Even though the program is officially sponsored by Weill Cornell, all of my work so far as taken place at the Hospital of Special Surgery, a hospital known for its work and expertise in orthopaedics. At HSS, I have been mentored by research staff and resident doctors working under Dr. Hollis Potter, chief of radiology at the MRI Center. Within the center, Dr. Potter observes a variety of projects on MRI imagining ranging from studying paraxial loading of the meniscus to interactions in the peripheral nervous system. Given my interest on degeneration of musculoskeletal tissue, I have been most involved in the paraxial loading study, working closely with Dr. Matthew Koff.

My work at the MRI Center has focused mostly on analyzing the degeneration of cartilage in certain joints such as meniscus and thumb. This is done by analyzing T1 and T2 profiles on images obtained by the MRI scanner. The analysis allows you to characterize water content and tissue histology, allowing you to assess the level of degeneration happening in the cartilage. In the long term, the center is also hoping to characterize the healing "pattern" for patients undergoing a meniscus transplant using these same techniques, hoping to understand how to optimize current surgical practices at HSS.

Patient interaction has been minimal so far, with my main experience so far having been observing a MRI scan of a patient undergoing loading of his knee prior to a meniscus transplant. Given ongoing collaborations with other doctors, it's my expectation that I will eventually observe surgical practices at HSS.

Currently, I am back in Ithaca for the weekend in order to participate at a symposium but I am already looking forward to returning back to HSS on Monday. It seems that that I was given the chance to receive a full body MRI scan. It will be interesting to look at clinical research from a pseudo-subject point of view.