#biomedical engineering

[tired-bme]

Thursday, February 13th

Survived my mass and heat transport midterm. Might even have passed. The horrors I went through in those 4 hours were insane.

BUT! I’m going to NY to visit my lovely sibling tomorrow and could not be more excited!!!!!

[gunsandspaceships]

Tony's surgeries in the cave: Part 3. Second Surgery

Why the second surgery was necessary: Part 1, Arrhythmia, Reactor, Part 2

What was done:

Removal of the electromagnet.

Sternectomy - partial removal of Tony's sternum.

Removal of some chest and abdominal muscles (some partially, some completely).

Removal of parts of at least 4 ribs on both sides together with parts of attached muscles.

Yinsen may or may not have removed the thymus.

Tony's heart was slightly shifted back in his chest cavity.

Implantation of pacemaker-ICD electrodes running from the bottom of the reactor housing to the heart (This could be done either directly through the chest cavity outside the heart, or through the subclavian vein into the heart).

Removal of parts of Tony's lungs/lungs moved to the sides.

Displacement of blood vessels in Tony's chest.

Displacement or removal of lymph nodes in the chest. In case of removal - replacement with an artificial system connected to the reactor housing.

Implantation of the titanium reactor housing, its attachment to the parts of the sternum that were not removed.

Connecting the housing to the ribs using rib clamps.

Attaching the reactor with the pacemaker to the housing.

Suturing muscles and tendons to the reactor using surgical/biological mesh.

Closing the wound with polyester cuff around the housing where it meets the skin.

Suturing the sternectomy incision.

How do we know this actually happened?

In addition to the reasons stated in Part 1:

After the first surgery, we don't see the reactor housing in Tony's chest. The electromagnet is bolted to the sternum and, unlike the reactor, cannot simply be temporarily removed from the chest.

As you can see below, unlike the electromagnet, the reactor housing is complex, clean, made of titanium and designed specifically for the arc reactor.

Remember about internal organs - you can't just make a hole and put anything in there, no matter how deep it is. You'll need to remove or displace something.

In the scenes below we can see a fresh sternectomy scar after the reactor was implanted. The scar looks different every time, and sometimes it disappears completely thanks to makeup artists. There is not a single scene with this scar before the reactor.

As I mentioned in The Cave timeline (March 1 - April 12), several weeks passed between the successive scenes: Tony finished working on the reactor and showed Yinsen the armor blueprint > the security camera scene and the backgammon scene.

The two weeks between the first surgery and Tony waking up would not have been enough time to recover from the trauma of the reactor implantation. Tony instantly jumps to his feet and is able to raise his arms above his head and hold a car battery - nope, that's absolutely unrealistic.

The Ten Rings would not allow them not to work, but we see them playing board games. Post-op recovery explains it.

[reionized]

people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science

[mindblowingscience]

Amputees’ hopes to experience the feeling of human touch using their prosthetics are becoming closer to reality. Now, new technology is allowing them to feel temperature—even in limbs that are no longer part of their bodies. For the first time, a functional artificial limb has been fitted with fingertip sensors that allow an ordinary prosthetic hand to sense and respond to temperature just as a living hand does. The device provides a realistic sense of hot and cold in the missing “phantom” hand by delivering thermal information to nerve areas on the amputee’s residual limb that the brain believes are still connected to the missing hand. The MiniTouch, described in a study published Friday in Med, was created with affordable off-the-shelf electronics, requires no surgery and can be fitted to existing commercial prosthetic hands in a matter of hours.

Continue Reading.

[mdesk]

tuesday, feb 4

long day today. although very productive. the grind resumes.

today was my first day making nanoparticles on my own! i only made the solution today, and i'm going to do the freeze-thaw and extrusion steps on…friday. i also desperately need to write my proposal but i don't think i can get to it before thursday.

i also need this week to get over soon because i was genuinely tweaking today. like, someone sedate me. please.

like, let me listen to my bach and pretend i'm an alchemist. that's all i want. or turn me into a frog and put me in a warm little pond. that's also an option.

today's work is much like yesterday's-

to do:

finish polymer chemistry homework

finish tissue engineering reading

redo instrumentation quiz 2

correct instrumentation homework

🎧: bach violin concertos (bach is bae, prove me wrong)

[discombobulateddisco007]

Guys I'm trying SO HARD TO MAKE THIS A THING 😭

I'm a biomedical engineering student working with crispr gene editing technology specifically targeted to curing disease

The patient needs mouse bites to live, MORE MOUSE BITES

[a-dash-in-the-middle]

big question for tumblr girlies

what are your favourite research papers?

[tired-bme]

Sunday, March 16th

Some snowy day studying at our local pie shop to kick off finals week. I have two finals this week: Regenerative Engineering and Heat and Mass Transport. Much to study, very little time!

[ggstudyblr]

notes ft. my emotional support claw clip :P scans attached below

just trying to catch up. my prof tells us to print the lecture powerpoints so we don't write as much but idk how I feel about it.

excited to write these! my s/o got me a big pack of mildliners <3 so I wanted to test all of them

[gunsandspaceships]

Tony's surgeries in the cave: Part 1. Why there were 2 surgeries

As I mentioned earlier and as suggested in this post, Tony had to undergo two surgeries in the Afghan cave: the first to remove the shrapnel and attach the electromagnet to his sternum, the second to implant the socket for the arc reactor, pacemaker for Tony's heart, and finally the reactor.

We were not shown the second surgery on screen, but there had to be one for the following reasons:

Yinsen did not implant reactor's housing and pacemaker during the first surgery.

Here is the only shot from the movie showing Yinsen inserting the electromagnet into Tony's chest. We don't see the socket for the arc reactor or a huge hole. Because at that time, Yinsen obviously had no plans to place a reactor there. All he did - bolted a shallow electromagnet to Tony's sternum.

Yinsen was not an engineer. Despite what you can read on the MCU fandom wiki page about him, he wasn't "Master Engineer". You don't have to be an engineer to know that electromagnets attract metal. Yinsen was smart, educated, and had extensive experience dealing with shrapnel wounds. That's all. As we see in the movie, he wasn't particularly confident with technology. Under those circumstances, he could not build a pacemaker and an arc reactor housing on his own. You can see how complex it was in that post about reactor. The only person who could do it was Tony. And during the first surgery he certainly wasn't able to build anything.

For all the technology that was implanted into Tony's body, Tony and Yinsen needed a lot of things, such as titanium, a pacemaker or parts to create one, surgical mesh, etc. Unlike rusty electromagnets and car batteries, these things are not found in caves. They had to order it or take from other stuff they were given after the first surgery.

Making things like a pacemaker and the socket takes time. If you are Tony Stark - less time, if you are a biomedical engineer - more time, not an engineer - much more time or eternity. No way Yinsen would have been able to do this before/during the first surgery even if he had all the necessary components.

Tony didn't need a pacemaker during the first surgery. Yinsen didn't mention that something's wrong with Tony's heart itself, that Tony needs a pacemaker or that he implanted one. Something happened to Tony's heart after that, so pacemaker became a necessity, and it was implanted along with reactor.

Complexity of the procedure: as you could see in the post, such a surgery requires serious changes in the patient's chest, affecting the bones, heart, lungs, muscles, nerves, etc. It would require a huge amount of time, a lot of drugs, including a good general anesthetic (chloroform and an awake patient are incompatible with such a procedure), a ventilator, and a lot of recovery time.

You're probably thinking that Marvel made a mistake and forgot about the second surgery, but they just didn't show it for the sake of time and PG-13 rating.

Part 2. First Surgery

Part 3. Second Surgery

[halfhildhalfmarilyn]

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[ravenofspades]

ok i am gonna go on a bit of a fucking rant here, but

WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE UNITED STATES AND CHEMICAL SAFETY

i just bought, to make bone cement (long story), a bunch of chemicals at the beginning of all this, before i even bought the fucking chemicals, i was told i wouldn't need a lab coat. goggles were, at most, an afterthought when i asked about them because why the hell not, i got way more than i actually needed to because, yippee research, my budget is only for what i use anyways, this whole time the guy who's supposed to be, y'know, making sure i don't kill myself is trying to softly downplay the high concentration hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide we have in the room. are these like the 2 most common strong acids and bases? yes. did he tell everyone to not even fucking bother wearing goggles? yep. is anyone wearing a labcoat? NOPE i pressed him with pubchem articles and the training we had to get to even be allowed to walk in to the fucking lab that say, "yeah so even just working with HCl you need goggles and a lab coat, minimum" and he literally said "i don't believe that"

anyways the stuff i just bought is, in order:

- the boringest fucking polymer ever, most of them are like that - flammable irritant liquid, also extremely common - acutely toxic carcinogenic liquid - corrosive carcinogen - explosive carcinogen with all that, i need to wear anything from a lab coat to full hazmat suit, a SCBA if it's the only barrier or a respirator and fume hood/biosafety cabinet, face shield and goggles, etc. etc.

but no you don't even need a lab coat for this what are you talking about?

[alexistudies]

february 1st, 2024

one thing i was hoping to learn during my post-bac but never really got around to was spike sorting. in my neural engineering class, i'm finally learning how to do that!

although i don't plan on collecting neural data at this level, i do hope to collect LFPs as part of my research so learning this signal processing in general is going to be extremely helpful. so far, i've determined my threshold and plotted the threshold line within the data. the hard part is everything that comes next of template matching, principal component analysis (PCA), and all the like. after not really using MATLAB in yeeears, this has been an adventure but i'm surprised at how much i've been able to recall and proud of myself for having no shame in googling MATLAB functions lol. i know i can figure this out, i'm smart(ish).

this hw is due feb 7th (with possibility of an extension if other people in the class take a while) so time to get her done. ft my pupper knocked out on the floor

[mdesk]

friday, feb 8th

i was truly in circuit jail today. instrumentation lab was so bad that i have to go in tomorrow to get the correct data 😭😭

although the lab in golden hour is unfortunately quite aesthetic. so do with that what you will.

also also also pizza at lab meeting today! i made nanoparticles after ages and spent some time relearning how to do it. my particles were a tiny bit small (they should be around 200 nm).

now i'm just watching my cdrama after eating a delishos dinner. no studying tonight.

[burntoutstemkid]

hey so fellow biomedical engineers, does it get easier? (asking as a incoming junior)

and let me rephrase the word easier, I mean does the academic imposter syndrome get any better. currently battling the whole “well there’s more women in biomed than other engineering professions” or “it’s not real engineering” pressure.

I go to a tech-heavy school, and am starting to succumb to the external and internal pressure, any words of encouragement/advice would be awesome :)

[research-and-survive]

23 March 2024

(6/100 days of productivity)

Today was just a relaxing Saturday with a friend, nice lunch and dessert and a walk by the beach 🥰

We all need these days to recharge after the working week!