Week 5 & 6

Week 5 & 6.

Last week, I spent most of the time in the lab at blood bank. The lab doesn’t have much but his engineering team is building up the prototype of endoluminal surgical platform there. ESP is the medical device designed for providing better surgical platform in the lumen. Due to the movement of the intestine, procedures with colonoscopy such as resection of polyps need better assistant with more stable tools. ESP has two different balloons before and after colonoscopy so that it can have stable field of views to perform procedure. Currently the engineers in the lab has a bit of problem to expand these two ballon appropriately so I was trying to help how we could figure out this problem. 

In week 6, I had lots of new cases of patients which I haven’t experienced. The procedure itself was not a new as resecting bad piece of colon but I was finally able to see the colon with crohne disease. Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory disease happened in digestive track. This sustained inflammation can cause periodic severe attacks, lead to other disease, and often cancerous tissue. This patient also had crohn’s disease for several years so has been his long-time patient. However, this time, he was diagnosed to a colon cancer so he finally decided to remove entire colon. After the procedure done, I could feel the tissue but I was pretty shocked by the size and the stiffness of the tissue. It was the biggest cancer I have ever felt. I am sometimes pretty shocked by how stiff the diseased tissue can be. But this time, it was almost a rock. Another miserable disease is diverticulitis. It is a simple extrusion or pocket inside of the intestine usually caused by food but the treatment for this is really tricky. There is no simple treatment for this disease but this small pocket sometimes causes severe abdominal pain which makes patient be in emergency room. I hoped I could contribute to develop simple device to treat this instead of resecting entire colon and I am now seriously thinking to find the way.