July is already mid way through and it feels like my time in Costa Rica is running out. This week Sarah and I got to print the first iteration of our Transcranial Doppler Transducer Holder for the TCD helmet, though we already found issues with dimensions and availability of parts in Costa Rica. It seems we need to hurry a little bit on the progress of it, but just having this first part is already exciting.
In HNN, we continued shadowing Dr. Bogantes and accompanied Fabián in an Ocular Photosensitive Stimulation Study. The OPSS is done to check for ocular nerve damage and if there is damage, to differentiate in which region of the nerve the damage is present. The study graphs a response to the stimulus that is averaged from 100 cycles of stimulation. After this, we witnessed a Full Body Stimulus Response, which does the ocular study, together with auricular and neuromuscular study to understand if there is any nerve damage or problems with the conduction of the brain stem in response to the stimulus. It was interesting to learn that the auricular test isn’t done primarily to check for auricular damage but to understand if there is any problems in signal conduction on the brain stem since the auricular nerves pass directly through the brain stem and gets amplified here so the signal is measurable.
Later on the week, Sarah and I got to observe on interventions and procedures in the Haemodynamics under the supervision of Dr. Mas, a colleague of Dr. Bogantes. Here we learned about the equipment used in haemodynamic interventions specifically the different catheters, stents and plugs used for the procedures. Sarah and I also were pretty happy we got to have matching outfits again! Hopefully we can make a little more progress with out project this next week.