Sunday, February 22, 2009

Sinuses Problems


It suprised me, when I started working in CT, how many people have sinus problems. It seens to a common thing and a lot of people have surgery to help with their problems. Sinus problems can cause infections, severe headaches, pressure in the head, and more. Some cases I have seen the patient actually gets severe vertigo from sinus problems. We perform sinus CT on all different ages. Sometimes antiobotics dont even help. If one has sinusitis and they do not have it treated it can lead to chronic sinusitis and severe infections. The way doctors help with sinus problems vary. One of the most common surgeries is nasal irrigation. It is a very common problems here and hopefully one day they will have a better solution.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Orbits and Grave's Disease


One disease that I find interesting is grave's disease. I figured this was a wonderful oppurtunity to talk about graves when learning about the orbits. The orbits help diagnose graves disease by determining changes in the optic nerve and orbital shape. In graves disease the orbits can be decompressed, which requires surgery and problems with vision. Other symptoms include: decreased ocular motility, exposure keratitis, optic neuropathy, and poor cosmesis per emedicine.medscape.com. Graves disease goes way back and was orginally called Graves- Basedow disease. In 1835 they described graves disease as hyperthyroidism, goiter and exophthalmos per emedicine.com In graves disease the thyroid gland becomes enlarged and is called a goiter. Picture by: http://spinwarp.ucsd.edu/neuroweb/Text/orb-220.htm

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Pituitary Gland







I am writing about pituitary tumors this week. I find it very interesting that something so small can get tumors and can affect so much. In an article I read that 75% of pituitary tumors release hormones, which is a lot. If they release too much hormones thatn several things can happen such as:giantism, hypothyroidism, cushing syndromes, etc. Hypopituitarism is caused when the hormone secreting cells of the pituitary are damaged sue to the growth of the tumor. I received most of my information from the website: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000704.htm
http://www.ghorayeb.com/PituitaryMRI.html


Sunday, February 1, 2009

IAC/ temporal bones


Wow the ear was a lot more complicated, as far as anatomy goes, than I expected.


I believe the part if the ear that I find most interesting is the 3 small bones, malleus, incus and stapes. They are so tiny and help the ear with sounds and protecting the inner parts. They help with sound by vibrating noises off eachother. They also have nicknames. They are also known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup.


They also do implants of the middle ear with these three tiny bones. I was doing a ct with a man that had the implants done. He was able to hear fine and had no complications.


Here is a picture of the three small bones I find so interesting:



Sunday, January 25, 2009




This week we have been learning about the brain. I have researched on heamtomas aka brain bleeds because we have a lot of patient that come in with hematomas. There are two types of intracranial hematomas mainly casued by trauma, epidural and subdural. Epidural is described as a hematoma between the skull and first layer of the brain. A subdural is described as a hematoma betwwen the outer and middler layer of the brain. I found two pictures on the website http://www.merck.com/.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Hello Everyone

Hello everyone this is my pathology blog now. I do not know what happened. My name is Emily and I am a Ct Technologist at Clarian North Hospital which is aka Riley North. I have been doing ct for two years now but have not taken my boards. I am looking forward to gaining more knowledge in ct and mri , then taking my boards.