Dr. Gitajn accepting her award at a ceremony in Boston, MA.
Dr. Leah Gitajn, Staff Surgeon in the Department of Orthopaedics and Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics, will be directing a 2019 Stepping Strong Innovator Award Research Project in collaboration with Dr. Shudong Jiang and DS-GL's Dr. Jonathan Elliott entitled "improving outcomes of patients with fracture-related infections"
Adequate blood flow to bone is critical after traumatic fracture and infection, to deliver oxygen, nutrients, and antibiotics to infected bone. Currently, there are no objective intraoperative real-time methods suitable for assessing bone viability and thoroughness of debridement.
Our goal with the Stepping Strong award is to provide clinicians with an objective measure of thoroughness of debridement that will result in less variation and enhanced treatment of fracture-related infection.
This objective measure include techniques developed by the DS-GL to quantify endosteal and periosteal bone blood flow, the subject of a recent post. In fact, this project is one of the direct ways that using dynamic information rather than static images could impact clinical practice–what the Dynamic Surgical-Guidance Lab is all about!
Read more about this prestigious award and about Dr. Gitajn, a very exciting innovator-surgeon in the Department of Orthopaedics at Dartmouth-Hitchock:
http://steppingstrong.bwh.harvard.edu/stepping-strong-innovator-i-leah-gitajn/
