On the road to immersion (Week 8)

This is the final week and looking back at my immersion term, I feel satisfied. I am immensely grateful to work alongside Dr. Irina Sobol (my clinical mentor), Dr. Yoshifumi Naka and Dr. Evelyn Horn.

Throughout this journey, I was able to attend LVAD clinics, visit patients in the ICU, learn about different surgical techniques used to implant LVAD in advanced heart failure patients, learn about the biological landmarks which are looked by a surgeon during surgery to ensure proper implantation, and many more interesting behind the scenes clinical stuff. In addition to my clinical experience, I completed a research project which was quantifying the inlet cannula angle in patients with HeartMate3 who have undergone 3 different surgical techniques. 

The research project was a success. The algorithm written by me to obtain orientation of pumps from X-ray radiographs works very well and preliminary results in our 13 patient cohort shows promise. Therefore, we are going to extend this project to a larger patient cohort in collaboration with Columbia. It will be very interesting to figure out the ideal cannula placement angle based on my findings and some CFD simulations (investigating the flow dynamics given the 2 measured Euler angles). Fruition of the extended project will allow us in the future to provide guidelines for surgeons about placing LVAD in patients close to the ideal cannula angle - this is to ensure proper ventricular unloading and reduce admittance of patients post LVAD implantation. I am very excited about the future of this project.

In closing I will like to say that I will treasure the knowledge I gained here and hope that I am successful in including my "immersion-term" learning into my research.

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