Created 06/23/2017 at 2017:01PM

Wow this week has really flown by, and I've been kept quite busy absorbing new information. It’s been an enjoyable first week in Annapolis, Maryland, and I’ve explored parts of the beautiful downtown, and going on runs near the harbor with the Annapolis Striders, a fantastic running club.

This summer, I am working on a telestration project that will help teach surgical fellows how to perform minimally invasive surgeries. These surgeries are known as laparoscopic surgeries, where a small camera, and surgical tools are inserted through several ports in the body, instead of the more traditional, "open" surgeries.

While our mentor Professor Helena Mentis from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, we are mainly stationed at Anne Arundel Medical Center where we get to get acquainted with the surgical equipment training tools. We are really fortunate integrate on the internship program at Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), and have the opportunity to gain medical knowledge as well. Each week, there are several medically related lectures, a journal club, and how to best analyze medical data.

Each week on Monday though, we have "fika" at UMBC, a Swedish tradition that involves coffee and delicious snacks. I got to meet my mentor Professor Helena Mentis, graduate students, other DREU summer interns at UMBC in the Human Centered Computing lab, and learn about their current research projects.

The rest of my week, I've read papers on topics ranging from integrating technology into education, detection limits of Microsoft Kinect on finger numbers, and on the usage of gesture systems in the surgical room. Previous graduate students and interns have written up the code so that we can interact with the Kinect, commanding it to "draw," "point" on the screen and also "erase" the screen contents. The codebase is a .NET application, and it’s exciting to get exposure to a new web technology. We also hooked the up the computer to a surgical teaching laparoscopic station (one with fake skin coverings, a cavity representing the body, surgical probes and a camera). Later I had the opportunity to play around with it, and it was much harder than I thought, picking up objects from a peg board using only tactile senses and a 2D screen, relearning how to “see.” Eventually, we plan to collect data on whether using the Kinect as a teaching tool, to see if surgical fellows in learning better with it. Potentially this technology can be used in telemedicine, teaching physicians in other geographical places surgical techniques and training.

Today I actually attended a conference on the "Controversies in Bariatric Surgery," where experienced physicians discussed the benefits, tradeoffs of various techniques including sleeve gastrectomy, robotic assisted surgery, and even intra-gastric balloons. It was really interesting to learn about the many factors that went into deciding the best treatment for each patient, and the level of both pre and post operative care. For example, they also needed to consider psychological factors in treating patients. Some patients with depression and anxiety disorders actually saw a worsening in their symptoms after these elective weight-loss procedures, which may have been due to different absorption of psychiatric medications, but also due to a belief that losing weight would fix all other problems as well. In general, Post-surgery, patients had more anxiety over food, and some needed to be referred to in-patient treatment based on excessive weight loss or intensity of symptoms. But in the presenter's opinion, online surveys would always be insufficient in measuring the psychiatric state of a patient, since they did not capture the general mental affect that is observed in-person. Potentially with the advancement of detection of facial expressions and speech, technology to detect depression or other psychiatric illnesses will be more widespread, and included in the current simple check-box surveys, mental health professionals will have more time freed up.

Robotic-assisted surgery has potential benefits to give the surgeon more autonomy, less overall fatigue, and control of the camera, and also better ergonomics as they might not have to twist their body into contorted positions. However, some surgeons in the crowd mentioned that by creating a sit-down environment, surgeons might actually be harmed by the robotic-assisted surgeons - referencing that many people nowadays are using stand-up desks for their health benefits. So for the future robotic surgery designers, I suppose that we could make stand-up robot-controlled positions?

It is quite interesting to see the role that technology plays in the medical field, and the ways it will continue to be used in the future. Next week I get the opportunity to shadow a physician for a few days, and am so curious to see the inside of an operating room for the first time. I'm looking forward to what the rest of this summer brings!