Star Trek tricorder?
Over at Future Pundit is this:
High Intensity Ultrasound Seals Bleeding Lung Like Star Trek Tricorder
Leonard "Bones" McCoy's medical tricorder couldn't do everything. After all, it didn't detect any readings from Trelane. But the tricorder didn't just have the ability to scan. The tricorder could heas as well (e.g. the doctor in Voyager used his tricorder to heal a "hairline fracture of the pre-maxilla bone" after Seven clobbered an alien). Well, the US Department of Defense is funding development of a portable high intensity ultrasound sound wave device to stop internal bleeding.
Engineers at the University of Washington are working with Harborview doctors to create new emergency treatments right out of Star Trek: a tricorder type device using high-intensity focused ultrasound rays. This summer, researchers published the first experiment using ultrasound to seal punctured lungs.
"No one has ever looked at treating lungs with ultrasound," said Shahram Vaezy, a UW associate professor of bioengineering. Physicists were skeptical it would work because a lung is essentially a collection of air sacs, and air blocks transmission of ultrasound. But the new experiments show that punctures on the lung's surface, where injuries usually occur, heal with ultrasound therapy.
"The results are really impressive," Vaezy said. He cautions that this is still in the early stages and the technique is not yet being tested on humans.
As much as I like to see techie stuff advanced (although there are times I wish all the R&D folks would get a year's sabbatical and allow the rest of us to catch up), FuturePundit brings up an important point - sure it may be real useful in the future, he asks an important question:
But how do they know where to focus the beam? They can't heat the entire chest without basically cooking the bleeding person to death. So how to locate the locations with dangerous bleeds?
Guess more work is needed....
