Monday I went to the PICU for the morning rounds. I joined the group of Dr. Marianne Nellis, which is the "nursing" group, while the other group is the "cardiac" group. After going through the basic information for each patients on the list, we headed to the first unit. It was a patient with lysosomal disorder, which made her own immune system attack her healthy cells. In order to stop this backfiring, doctor applied treatment to turn down her immune activity. However, this results in her vulnerability towards various infections and contagions, which make it necessary for her to be under close monitoring and intense care.
Another case in PICU was a very young baby. For the infant inside the fetus, sometime it might excrete his/her waste into the amniotic fluid. However, in rare cases, the infant could take the waste into their lungs via the mouth, hence causing damage to the breathing system. This baby was one of those. On the parallel, the baby also suffered from low resilience of lung tissue, and high viscosity between lung compartments, which made it difficult for him to fully breath. In regard of this issue, doctors proposed to perform a genetic test on the baby to determine whether this lung disorder is inherited.
For other time this week, I followed Dr. Prince through some interesting cases. Some of them had a common feature: fluid filled sacs in the kidney, or poly-cystic kidney. With MRI, we are able to differentiate kidney cysts by the contrast provided by different modalities. For example, blood cyst shows as bright region on T1-weighted MR image, but dark on T2-weighted MR image due to its long relaxation time. I noticed that it was huge workload for the radiologist to calculate the cystic ratio of kidney, which was always done manually. Hence it begged the question how we can automatically measure the cyst properties or quantities from MR kidney images.
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