Thursday, June 09, 2011

Working at Orthopaedic Injury Biomechanics Group

For the past three months, I have been working at OIBG at Vancouver General Hospital. It has been an invaluable experience for someone like me. Coming from computational dynamic modeling my knowledge was well in use in this research centre.
I have been working on Pro-Neck_Tor helmet which is a novel helmet designed to reduce neck injuries to lower neck due to head-first impact.
I have used MSC.ADAMS to develop a dynamic neck model. A hybrid III head and helmet with special slot to let the head follow a trajectory has been integrated to the model as shown in the video. The helmet allows the torso trajectory to continue along the path prescribed reducing torso momentum on the lower neck; therefore registering lower neck resultant forces. Here, I have uploaded the animation on the youtube.

Sunday, June 05, 2011

Retinal detachment!

It has been a long time since I have written here. but then I may say I have an excuse.
About almost little longer than 5 weeks ago, I had sudden retinal detachment of my right eye.
I woke up on April 17 around 5:00 am noticing that 1/4 of my vision is gone. Similar to hanging the black curtain on that region. So, I went to to emergency department. It took them about an hour to call me in for an observation. The residence was an Iranian girl who was on rotation. I had to explain to her that is important to call upon an ophthalmologist on call. After explaining to her about 2 times telling her, I had surgery recently and intra-ocular implant, she called upon her emergency chief. The guy even didn't bother to talk to me. He picked up the phone and called uupon the specialist. The residence returned to the room and said that the specialist has said I go get some brakfast and she will come by 1:00 pm. I was startling and upset. I ran to the chief emergency resident telling him, look if I lose my vision by then, I take you responsible.
So, he called the ophthalmologist on call again and she replied, she will come around 10:00 am.
Exactly at 10:00 am, the resident arrived and we went together to eye care building (apparently since most eye surgeries are day-in based, there is no ophthalmologist department in the hospitals, there are separate clinics which most of the works are done there.). She did and ultra-sound and confirmed my suspicious, it was detachment. She quickly called the retinal specialist, who in one hour came in and send me to a ward to be waited for the immediate surgery. as my blindness was progressing, I asked what can be done, I was put on the clinic chair for 20 minutes upside down. Finally, I was taken to the surgery room and under general anesthesia, the surgery was performed.
I have to be thankful that my vision is not completely gone and could be saved. But I have tons of distortion in that eye. Things seems in an angle and many distortion.
I am told between 6 months to 2 years may take the recovers, but it may never be even cured.
The surgeons performed total vitrotoctomy inject a bubble instead of vitrious get. I have that get about 1 weeks and it was gone. I am still recoveing.
So, that has been the sotry for the time being.