Orthopaedic Trauma and Spine Research
In This Video
- Mitchel B. Harris, MD, is chief of Orthopaedic Surgery, an orthopaedic trauma surgeon and professor of orthopaedic surgery at Harvard Medical School.
- In this video, he discusses his wide-ranging research on orthopedic trauma and spine.
In this video, Mitchel Harris, MD, chief of Orthopaedic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses his wide-ranging research on orthopedic trauma and spine. He’s interested in testing nanomedicine on high-energy open fractures, cultivating the power of artificial intelligence to treat spinal injuries and reinvigorating the stem cells of geriatric patients to heal fractures.
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Transcript
My personal research interests in trauma have been to try to address what we would consider the holy grail of orthopedic trauma, and that is the high energy, open fracture, which has both bone loss, as well as bacterial colonization. With the support of the Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation, we have been funded to look at a nanomedicine approach to this problem, trying to direct both antibiotics but also growth factors to the area most compromise from the local trauma.
The majority of my recent work in spinal research has been collaborative in looking at reconfiguring some of our algorithms previously utilized for spinal epidural abscess management, as well as spinal metastases management. We've used the rigorous approach of artificial intelligence and larger databases to try to support some new conclusions about treatment and prognosis. An additional area of research that I was involved with was to reinvigorate the stem cells of the geriatric patient population. We see many patients here that suffer fragility fractures or fractures of the elderly and they don't have as robust a response to fractures as children or young adolescents. Therefore, we've been looking at how to reinvigorate the stem cells or the osteoblasts of the geriatric patient population, in hopes that they will heal their bone's fracture and potentially return to independence quicker.
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