Conclusions

The last week of my senior project is here!  In terms of results, here are some graphs illustrating the results I collected from the tensile strength tests. I will be presenting my findings and talking about my internship experience in the beginning of May.

Thank you for following my blog for the past few weeks. I had a wonderful experience at Banner Health. Shout-out to my college counselor Ms. Mitrovich, my faculty advisor, Mr. Carey, and lastly, my on-site mentor, Dr. Truong, for all being awesome. And thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Vanessa

Week 10/ Wrapping Up

This week, I went and bought new tissue for testing, and have been preparing the samples for testing next week. The segments will be stitched with different types of sutures—Stratafix, v-loc, and ‘regular’ vicryl. The pressure will again be measured by the arterial line setup and hopefully I will be able to compare the results to see if the suture type affects burst pressure for these samples. I have also spent a lot of this week researching at home, not only reading up about compartment syndrome, but also continuing to analyze my tensile strength data. Compartment syndrome really illustrates how capillary perfusion will fall due to high pressures in an area and points out to the fact that it is unlikely that vessels reach these abnormally high pressures. Thus, for my project, instead of measuring when the fluid will begin to leak from the tissue segments, I will be focusing on whether the stitches hold at certain ‘normal’ pressures that may exist in real conditions, and not just under simulated experimental/lab conditions.

In addition to my SRP project, I spent the second half of my week visiting Cornell. I was lucky enough to dorm with one of my old friends, and even got to sit in on several courses. The campus was beautiful (but huge, walking anywhere took around 10-15 minutes) and I had a really great time.

Cornell's bell tower

I have not yet committed to a school, but nonetheless it was an amazing experience to travel to Ithaca for the first time!

Hope everyone had a similarly great week! I will be conducting the rest of my trials soon, and can’t wait to share my results with you all. I have also been working on my presentation, to share my project with the greater community, that will occur on May 7th at the . My classmates and I will be presenting our findings from the past few months—feel free to come and take a look! (More information here).

Until next time,

Vanessa

Week 9/ Hiatus

Hi Everyone—this week I did not go to my SRP site, since I fell sick with a pretty bad cold. Work to be continued next week! See you soon~

Week 8/ Throwing a Stitch Pt. 2

Hi everyone & welcome back!

As my experiments with burst pressure continues, I have relocated to a new office near Cardon’s surgery wing, where the equipment is kept. A special shout-out to Ms. Berlin, who kindly agreed to let me run these experiments in her office, despite the smell/messiness! Having brought in the tissue samples and been shown how to do a purse string suture to attach the needle/catheter to the sample, an anesthesia tech kindly helped us set-up the arterial line and showed us how to calibrate the monitor. Here is what the set-up looks like:

The apparatus I used to test burst pressure is called an arterial line. To reiterate from previous blog posts, an A-line is usually used to monitor patients in intensive care, and measures intra-arterial blood pressure.

This must be calibrated before the beginning of each test, or ‘zero’ed so that the pressure is at zero. Then, to pump fluid through the catheter and into the tissue sample, the blue tag is pulled. Once the tissue inflates, the observer would watch for signs of leaking and then record the pressure immediately after fluid can be seen.

The IV/Flushing system is controlled, in short, by a 3-way stopcock.

In terms of preparing the tissue sample, I started out with segments about 8 cm in length, sutured close on both ends. We tried running tests on these (see tissue sample with green butterfly wings), but due to the limited amount of solution/time, decided against using such large samples. Afterwards, I cut the approximately 8 cm long segments in halves and sutured up the open ends. These smaller segments are what I will be running tests on in the future!


Above is a 4 cm long segment, with a butterfly catheter attached via purse string suture. The reason for the “butterfly wings” or side flaps around the needle are to anchor it to the tissue, in case pressure causes it to pop out.

The A-line offers a wealth of information, but for this experiment, I will only be looking at the pressure (pictured above in red).

A problem that I encountered this week came from the difficulty of determining exactly when the tissue sample started leaking. Once it begins to leak, the pressure stops increasing but fluctuates quickly. It was pretty difficult to get a precise measurement. In future testing, Dr. Truong suggested that I use food coloring so that the liquid that spills out will be easier to visualize. This, however, involves flooding the entire bag of saline solution (and even injecting the food coloring into the saline bag), which may be difficult to carry out and cause the saline bag to be unusable after my experiments.

These few hours that I spent working on testing burst pressure are some of the most interesting I have experienced in the project thus far!! It has been really exciting to be able to get the chance to use this equipment and even run tests with it.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Vanessa