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U.S. Military Developing Ultrasonic Tourniquet
Burlap writes to tell us the MIT Technology Review is reporting on a new DARPA venture to create an "ultrasonic tourniquet" to help stem bleeding on injuries sustained in battle. The project plans to commit $51 million over the course of 4 years. From the article: "[I]t aims to create a cuff-like device that wraps around a wounded limb. Rather than applying pressure to the wound to stem the flow of blood, the device would use focused beams of ultrasound (sound waves above the audible frequencies) to non-invasively clot vessels no matter how deep they are."
clots "no matter how deep they are".
I believe this could also be a weapon whose end result would be indistinguishable from death by "natural causes".
I guess its appropriate the military came up with this.
Because the first thing that's going to happen when your clot's not big enough is that it's going to go to your lung. Or heart. Or brain.
You can expect the statistics of soldiers having strokes for no apparent reason to go WAY up.
Maybe they could invest in making a device that un-clots blood using the same technique? If they could say stop a clot before a stroke kicks in somehow.
Task Mangler
Once applied to a wounded limb, the cuff would automatically detect and then seal damaged blood vessels or arteries, by focusing beams of ultrasonic waves at the wound to clot it, in a process known as high-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU.
in other news, the CIA has a large number of "enemy combatants" that have died unexpectedly from stroke...
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Granted, my only medical experience is treating badly banged up Boy Scouts, but I can see two issues with this thing:
1) How reversible is it? I mean, once the wounded person gets to advanced medical care in a hospital or the battlefield equivalent, how easy is it to remove the clots? I know this (thryombolysis) can be quite tricky for hospitals to pull off as it is in cases like heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms.
2) What about partially formed clots? I can only imagine the damage caused by huge amounts of partially formed clots floating around in the body wreaking havoc.
Granted, if the person would clearly die without the treatment anyway, then those points are void. But surely this has more side effects than tying a piece of cloth around a limb and cinching really tightly.
At any rate, those seem like some pretty clever engineers and scientists at work, and I certainly hope this device works as well as they hope it does.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
"An individual from the local Army research center was hospitalized this afternoon. Doctors are puzzled by a mysterious disease that caused his penis to massively swell, then fall off. Witnesses in the emergency room said they heard muttering and sobbing 'I only had it on quarter power!'. It is currently believed that the condition is not contagious".
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Well, I guess, this device is meant for very special situations, when there is already an emergency -- think "wounds, sustained in battle" -- these aren't only 5.56 bullet wounds, but also severed arms, legs, inner bleeding etc. From what I remember from first aid classes I received during basic training (in an defence organisation, similar to the American Maryland National Guard), if you've got your leg severed, you don't really care if that clot is going anywhere at all... You've got literally seconds to stop the bleeding, because you lose hundreds of grams of blood every second (that is a liter in less than a minute). And if the question is life or death, it doesn't matter, that you have to risk the life of the injured to at least try to save his life.
BBC News carried a story about this back in June.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5106598.stm
Sorry, but whoever told you that should get some medical training first.
A regular turniquet is reversible for a while (that's why you should note the time at which the tourniquet was applied). Your extremities can survive without blood flow much longer than your brain can.
51 million in research.... plus who knows what the cost per tourniquet would be.... it is not just whether the amount of effectiveness versus a 25 cent strip of cloth going to save X number of lives, but whether you could have saved more lives by spending that money on something more practical, be it medical or otherwise.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Others are currently investigating this--try googling "ultrasound thrombolysis." Ultrasound can, under some conditions, help to break up clots, especially in combination with drugs like rt-PA. This is being applied to stroke treatment as well as deep venous thrombosis therapy.
The thinking regarding tourniquets among the U.S. military in Iraq is that they have such a rapid response in getting a wounded soldier to a hospital that they are handing out tourniquets to the ranks. The belief is that most wounded will get to surgery fast enough that the effect of the tourniquet is not a factor in deciding to save the limb.
This device appears to make a decision regarding the limb -- it may be a last-resort measure for the field for perhaps an instrument for conducting surgery at the hospital.
Early leaked information says that this so-called "sonic tourniquet" is able to open locks, repair mechanical devices, and communicate with computer systems. It is also usable as a tourniquet.