Week 5

This week was was pretty interesting and I got to learn some new techniques and see a couple talks. Early this week, I watched two surgeons in the lab operate on mice rotator cuffs to create a injury and repair model. They were rounding off their final control group in heir experiment where they were looking at the effect of using fibrin glue and endothelial stem cells at the repair site's healing properties.  Always impressed by how dexterous the surgeons are on such small tendons. I should be helping out on the histology for this project too before I leave.
Also this week, I went to rheumatology grand rounds which were really interesting! Dr. Parrish spoke about a mosquito-transmitted disease called Chikungunya. This mosquito came over as an invasive species in the US just recently by means of water in car tire shipments from Africa and Asia. It's actually scary because these Albopictus mosqiuitoes are projected to become a dominant species in the US eventually. Aside from a bug bite, the scary thing about these guys is the CHIKV virus is awful in terms of inflammatory arthritis. Parrish has seen patients who have been affected, and they get symptoms such as tenosynovitis and enthesopathies. Interestingly, it only seems to affect small joints like the knuckles, but not so much the knees. One of the mechanisms of the disease is that it results in high levels of inflammatory factors like IL-6 especially in chronic cases and it affects cells like epithelial cells, macrophages, osteoblasts, and causes muscle infection. Beware!
Also this week I saw a talk by Tony in the lab on a research project in progress looking at how a torn ACL affects joint mechanics by altering loading locations and magnitudes. The project is still in progress of course, but it tackles an important question of how an ACL tear results in PTOA.
And finally this week I learned or really revisited techniques from undergrad research learning the protocol for polarized light images of rotator cuff tendons and the analysis of fiber alignment. Tony found an awesome program called OrientationJ that is able to do the calculations and give results like entropy and coherence to describe the fiber alignment. This is useful for describing and understanding the quality of healing in tendon injuries.
Other than that, I wrapped up segmenting on all my MRI images--or so I thought! Shawn wants me to go through them one more time and clean them up. After that. we can import them into MATLAB and analyze differences between unloaded and loaded meniscuses. And the cool news here is that this may spin into an ORS abstract! Also this week, I discovered the HSS library, which has a really great collection of clinical books. I read up on some things related to Cornell research, mainly joint injections of HA and glucocorticoids and also researched the synovial membrane, which I think could make for a new research topic back in Ithaca I hope to discuss with Larry.