Week 4 - More MRIs and a Visit to MSKCC

 This week one of my clinical mentors, Dr. Gauthier, was on vacation, so I was unable to continue to shadow her in the MS Center. I was, however, still able to shadow my other mentor, Dr. Chiang, in the Neuro Reading Room. While there, two MRI scans stood out to me this week. One was of a toddler who had just turned two years old and was in car accident which led to a brachial plexus injury and a C8 nerve root injury. Luckily, despite the severity of the crash and the terrible diagnosis, the child suffered no brain or spinal cord injuries. The neuroradiology team that looked at the child's scan believed they could possibly regain full motor function with the help of a physical therapist someday. Some of the neuroradiologists in the room were openly surprised to see that the child's brain and spine were fine despite the level of damage that was done to other parts of their body. This scan was memorable to me because of the relief I felt when it was determined that there was no irreparable damage to the child's brain. Another case which stuck out to me was a patient who suffered from an acute stroke. There was nothing that set it apart from other strokes I had seen in the past, but this was the first time the comments on an MRI scan claimed the patient suffered a "brain attack." Nobody understood what that was and actually had to google it. It was the first time anybody in the neuro reading room that day had ever heard the phrase "brain attack." Apparently, some medical institutions have been pushing for strokes to be called this for years. I imagine the reason why some institutions may push for this is because it garners the same feeling of urgency that the phrase "heart attack" does, though that is just a personal theory. In regard to my summer research, the files containing the MRIs I will be using became available to me today. I am now looking forward to segmenting and analyzing the files next week.

I also took some time to reach out to and meet with researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering this week. I've been extremely interested in research relating to the use of natural killer cells for immunotherapy and vaccination lately, so with the free time I had due to Dr. Gauthier's vacation, I was able to meet Dr. Hsu and Dr. Sun at MSKCC and learn more about their recent work and attempts to bring their research from the benchtop to the clinic bedside. It was fascinating to get to learn more about their work, and the experience made me want to reach out to other translational researchers in the area so that I could learn more about the translational research that laboratories in NYC are pursuing.