Andi Garcia-Ortiz/Dr. Carli: Week 6 (July 10th - 14th, 2023)

Monday (July 10th, 2023)

I attended Dr. Carli's clinic on the 7th floor of the Weill Cornell East River Professional Building. Dr. Carli consulted over 20 patients during the clinic with various knee and hip ailments. Before clinic, I watched several HSS Academy videos including "Revision of Total Hip Arthroplasty Acetabular Component using Computer Navigation" by Dr. Mathias Bostrom. After clinic, I attended a revision case in the HSS 4th floor OR. I was also super lucky to score 8 bags of Simplex bone cement without antibiotics premixed which was very much needed for our cement studies in the lab.

Tuesday (July 11th, 2023)

The Prosthetic Joint Infection (PJI) research groups have weekly meetings at 8am at HSS Research Institute on the 6th floor. The group is led by Dr. Mathias Bostrom and Dr. Alberto Carli. After the meeting, I attended Dr. Georgy Shih's lecture on Potential Language Models (LLMs) in Healthcare in Starr 8A-05. Dr. Shih is an informatics professor and vice chair at Weill Cornell Medicine. We discussed generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and openAI. He defined a common problem of AI hallucinations and the exciting new power of GPT-4. The new program now has a limit of 50 pages of text versus 8,000 words. It can also interpret multimodal images such as screenshots and handwriting. After the meeting, I went back to the PJI lab on the 4th floor of the HSS Research Institute. We had a full day of experiments for our cement elution studies. I ran the vancomycin colorimetric assays for the 1, 2, 4, and 8hr time points.

Wednesday (July 12th, 2023)

I started my day at the PJI lab, where I ran the 24hr time point for the cement elution study. Afterward, I went to the HSS OR to shadow 4 cases. My favorite case was an infected knee revision that had to be drained and cleaned. It was really interesting to see the bacterial cleaning process with manual scraping and povidone-iodine and peroxide rinses.

Thursday (July 13th, 2023)

I completed the 48hr vancomycin colorimetric assay in the PJI lab.

Friday (July 14th, 2023)

I completed the 72hr vancomycin colorimetric assay in the PJI lab. Afterward, I went to the OR to shadow the remaining 4 cases of the day. They were all standard knee and hip replacements.

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