Ben Weppner / Dr. Hooman Kamel - Week 5

 Week 5: 07/03/23-07/07/23

This week, Dr. Merkler was once again the attending physician at the neuro ICU at WCMC. Since many members of the ICU team rotate every week, it was interesting to see how this new team of medical professionals communicated and were able to decide the next steps for each of their patients during rounds based on the patients' charts and visiting each patient.

On Wednesday, Dr. Zan allowed me to join her lecture on radionucleotide theranostics. She began with a brief introduction about the difference between anatomical imaging, such as MRI and CT, and functional imaging, such as PET. She explained how different radionucleotides, such as gadolinium, are used to see the target, as well as how chelation is important to minimize toxicity to the patient. She also explained the different tracers used in PET, such as DOTA-TATE and FDG, and how beta emission causes single strand DNA breaks, while alpha emission causes double stranded DNA breaks.

On Thursday, I was able to join Dr. Zan in the reading room. One important point she mentioned was how the spatial resolution of MRI can make it difficult to discern small structures, making diagnosis more difficult than if the spatial resolution were improved. Also, I spent time with the MRI techs at Weill Greenberg Center. They have a PET MRI scanner there, which was very exciting to me as I'd never seen one before. The techs explained how PET MRI combines the functional data from PET with the anatomical data from MRI to provide a better picture into what the problem could be. Also, they explained how PET has multiple tracers, and how different tracers are better for specific diseases than others, such as DOTA-TATE being useful for meningioma.

For research, I began compiling results of flow estimation from the PWI images from my model and comparing how they performed against a conventional tracer kinetics model. Also, I have been planning out the next steps for improving my model in order to more accurately measure the perfusion from the PWI images, thereby better predicting the penumbra following stroke.





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