Hey everyone, and welcome back to my blog! 

So I started my internship this week with the MORE Foundation, but, unfortunately I do not have a lot to say about my project this week. The MORE Foundation hasn’t started working on the project quite yet. They are still at the process of recruiting patients for the study. 

Since the MORE Foundation is constantly working on studies, I was able to help out with other studies until they started the one I will be sharing with you guys on my blog. While I was at my internship site, I went through patient charts looking for specific information that would be useful for the study, which is similar work to what I will be doing to help out for my project. But, I have to admit, it was much more difficult than I thought it would be. It is very tedious work. To hopefully speed up the process, I am also going to learning a lot more of the terminology than what I already have learned. This will allow me to comprehend the patient charts better and make myself more useful for the MORE Foundation. 

Since I don’t have much to say about the project, I figured I could tell you guys about the significance of the project. As a reminder, my project is developing a webpage that will calculate the chance a patient has an infection in their knee after a total knee arthroplasty (TKA) was performed on them. The key to treating a TKA infection is early diagnosis. Early diagnosis allows for a relatively straightforward treatment. Since inexperienced surgeons can sometimes have difficulty diagnosing a TKA infection due to mixed signals in a physical examination and in laboratory tests, the lack of conclusive evidence often leads to a delay in treatment. If the infection is present, the delay in treatment allows for the infection to grow, leading to a much more invasive and complicated infections. This causes multiple surgeries, rather than early detection and rapid aggressive treatment. Even if an infection is left untreated for a few weeks, the bacteria will adhere to the metal of the implant and form a biofilm. Once this biofilm has formed, the only good treatment option is the removal the implant, insertion of antibiotic materials into the joint area, and then after many weeks, insert a new implant. This requires at least two additional surgeries from the primary replacement surgery imposing heavy and emotional tolls on the patient. Because diagnosing an infected knee replacement is so difficult for inexperienced surgeons, the development of an algorithm to help detect TKA infections early on will lower the chances of patients having to deal with expensive follow-up surgeries.

Well thats about all I have for you guys today. See you next Friday!