FNNDSC Weekly Newsletter - Week 41
Updated: Apr 13, 2021
Upcoming Events
March 8th 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM: Newborn Medicine Grand Rounds | Jenna Katz, MD - Management of the Preterm Infant with Congenital Heart Disease, Password 605612
March 9th 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Seminar: Frontiers in Biostatistics
March 11th 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM: Promoting Vaccine Equality - A Global Perspective on Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution
March 16th 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM: Harvard Surgical HSR Speaker Series
Various Dates: Newborn Brain Society - Fetal Neurology Webinar Series
Helpful Links
Last Week's FNNDSC Project Updates
Placenta/Fetal Team
Dr. Abaci Turk is working on characterizing Braxton Hicks contractions and the associated change in placental oxygenation across gestation. It has been shown that maternal-placental perfusion is changed by Braxton Hicks uterine contractions, which occur throughout pregnancy. With better understanding of the fetal-placental response to these contractions, Braxton Hicks contractions might be used as a natural stress test to identify fetuses at increasing risk of hypoxic injury or death.
The fetal research team had a successful scan for our Advanced Fetal Imaging Phase 2 study last week. They are still continuing to work on characterizing fetal motion in their pipeline. The team is working on a maternal/fetal contraction project as well, and will start recruiting from their partner sites (MGH and BWH) soon for the Placental Health study!
NIRS Team
The NIRS team had another busy week this week, which started off with seeing one of the IVH study participants for their two year follow up! There were also multiple NICU measurements, as one of the surgery babies had an ETV/CPC this week and we performed multiple pre and post op measurements. To close out the week the NIRS team had a SCD/TCD neuroimaging visit with the MR team on a post gene therapy subject.
The NIRS engineering team completed a new probe design to improve signal quality in older patients. The team also worked to install new laser couplers into the MetaOx device, which will act to couple the DCS and NIRS lasers as well as accommodate for additional wavelengths in the NIRS laser.
ACG Team
The ACG team submitted a proposal to help diversity in opensource (and by extension openscience) through Outreachy. Outreachy provides paid, remote internships. Outreachy invites free and open source software communities to participate as well. Read more here: https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/the-chris-project/
On-site Administrative Support This Week
Gauravi will be onsite this week on Monday, March 8th.
Thank You and Farewell to Arushi Vyas!
Arushi Vyas has worked as a Research Developer with the Advanced Computing team at the FNNDSC in the past one year. She contributed to the ChRIS project by creating plugins and pipelines on the ChRIS Backend. Her plugins were mainly focused on simplifying the conversion of medical image formats like DICOM, NIfTI, and MGZ into friendly and readable formats like JPEG/PNG. She also contributed to creating ChRIS plugins for the widely used Free Surfer and some of its specific utilities like "mri convert". The FNNDSC wishes Arushi well as she embarks on her new career journey in Ohio! Her last day at Boston Children's Hospital will be this Friday, March 12th.