Mount Sinai is the first institution in the New York metropolitan area to offer robotic assisted breast reconstruction.
“As part of the breast cancer treatment process, even before the reconstruction starts, women already acquire many physical scars as well as psychological scars,” says Alice Yao, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “So during the reconstruction process, we are happy to be able to offer a method that could decrease the burden of additional scars. We’re using the da Vinci robot. It has already been used quite widely by other fields such as urology and gynecology. However today it is not commonly used by the field of plastic surgery.”
“The best candidates for this robotic procedure and breast reconstruction are patients who need to recruit their own tissue from their own body after they’ve had radiation treatment,” she says. “Some of the most popular procedures in this case are using tissue transfer from the abdomen, or using tissue transfer from the back. The robot comes into play when we have patients who do not want large donor site scars on their body from these procedures. Therefore we can use the robot to use a minimally invasive method of harvesting tissues in order to enhance the breast reconstruction.”
Dr. Yao adds, “I think the robot has quite a few benefits, both aesthetic and functional, starting with the cosmetic benefits. It leads to a much smaller scar, five to eight centimeters, as opposed to the traditional incision, which would be 15 to 45 centimeters. Secondly, for functional benefits, the smaller wound leads to less pain, fewer potential complications, and a shorter recovery. We want patients who have breast cancer to be aware that this is another option that they have.”
The critical developmental windows for the observed discrepancies varied for each element, suggesting that systemic dysregulation of environmental pollutants and dietary elements may serve an important role in ASD. In addition to identifying specific environmental factors that influence risk, the study also pinpointed developmental time periods when elemental dysregulation poses the biggest risk for autism later in life.
On the heels of new recommendations for prostate cancer screening, researchers at Mount Sinai are studying how to more precisely diagnose the disease.
“In prostate cancer, the primary method that clinicians use to characterize a cancer and decide on a treatment protocol is the Gleason grade, or the Gleason score, of the patient,” says Gerardo Fernandez, MD, the Medical Director of Pathology at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in New York. “Over the years, though, it turns out that we have over-treated prostate cancer by quite a bit. So the idea of having cancer leads a lot of patients to decide on radical treatments, namely surgery. What we’re trying to do is characterize prostate cancer more effectively than just by using the Gleason score.”
He adds: “Google might use similar techniques to characterize facial properties that allows them to do facial recognition software. We apply similar computer and engineering technology to images of cancer — how separated are the nuclei from one another, how bigger the nuclei, what protein markers do those nuclei contain. So we characterize these images with complex methods, and we extract these features out of them. Now, once we have the features, we use artificial intelligence-type approaches to take all of that data and figure out what combinations of features do a better job of predicting the behavior of the cancer than Gleason alone.”
Zahi Fayad, PhD, Director of Translational & Molecular Imaging Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses innovative imaging tools to diagnose cancer.
“We’re also diagnosing disease early on before it manifests itself. We are able to see the disease and detect it early on, and we can also see smaller structures,” says Dr. Fayad.
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine have discovered that people previously infected with Dengue and West Nile have an increased risk for severe Zika virus infection.
Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, PhD, Director of Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine: “If people behave similarly to what we have seen in mice, then that will indicate that these people that have antibodies against Dengue or West Nile are at risk of having an enhanced disease if they experience Zika virus infection.”
Jean Lim, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: “Among the cohort of Dengue and West Nile samples we studied, a large percentage of them were highly cross reactive to Zika virus. Not only that, but they were also able to enhance Zika virus infection.”
Ana Fernandez-Sesma, PhD, Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Sebastian Aguirre, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, discuss new findings published in their recent paper in Nature on dengue virus.
