Ariel Badger- 2022 VTCSOM Research Project

When I came to medical school, I knew I wanted a clinical research project, one that I could see the effects of somewhat immediately, of course, relatively speaking. So when I met with Dr. APL and I saw he was answering this question that patients really want to know the answer to. I immediately wanted to climb on board. It's unknown after different types of surgery, whether it be on the wrist or the shoulder, the knee, when a patient safe to go back to driving? And these are everyday common questions from patients. Aerial study was intended to answer a question of when can I go back to driving after having my carpal tunnel release search, we didn't know if we could really even measure driving fitness. And so when we began this, it was really kind of a, Let's see what happens. Let's see if it's possible. Became up to V TTI, we looked at their instrument of vehicles. They collect all sorts of information from different camera views to all the kinematic metrics, yaw, acceleration, speed, it'll have GPS coordinates. It looks at events, steering wheel angle. After we found that we could effectively and objectively measure driving fitness, it was great to be able to take this proof of concept that was done on just healthy volunteers into an actual patient population in the enclave, that's where we take the data collected from the hard drives and the car, which include again, all the kinematic metrics as well as the camera views. And what we got to do was go through each video and determine the timestamps at which certain maneuvers were occurring. So I would kind of go frame by frame, write down the start point and endpoint of those maneuvers so that we could ultimately extract the kinematic data. Why don't you this surgeries, this project started out asking simply a question about carpal tunnel release and width are methods and the skills that we gain. We're able to answer the same question about rotator cuff really. So what we found out surprisingly was that patients can drive pretty soon after surgery. She found in her research that the traditional way of looking at this problem by simply measuring patients in simulator, doesn't capture of who they are with their adaptive abilities. And in that way, she's changed the way that we think about this problem. I think the research curriculum is very important and it's a wonderful feeling to be able to really answer the question. Bank patients want to know the answer to. I feel like that's something that has been said quite often for this project. It has far exceeded my expectations. So it's truly been such an enjoyable experience and I'm really glad to have.