Survival of a wounded soldier depends not only on their swift transportation to a premium level medical facility, but it also highly depends on the initial medical treatment that he or she receives from the first respondents on the battlefield.
Among the first major concerns, any serious bleeding needs to be stopped by applying pressure on and then dressing the wounds properly, but usually because of severe internal injuries, soldiers lose a lot of blood before getting to a proper medical facility.
Because internal injuries cannot be compressed with tourniquets or haemostatic dressings like external wounds, wounded soldiers often loses their lives due to internal haemorrhaging.
To find a way to reduce the damage caused by internal haemorrhaging and to make most of the “Golden Hour” (that dictates to goal of transferring wounded soldiers to an advanced medical facility from the battlefield within the first 60 minutes after receiving injuries), DARPA initiated a program by the name of Wound Stasis System back in 2010.
During this program a performer of Wound Stasis, Arsenal Medical, Inc. created a foam like product that can help control internal haemorrhaging in the abdominal cavity of a wounded patient for a minimum of one hour.
Pre-clinical data for the foam provided by the Wound Stasis performers at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma in Kauai, Hawaii, showed that this product can treat haemorrhaging in cases of fatal liver injury for up to three hours. Therefore, this new technology is capable of increasing the survival rate of a seriously injured patient by 72 percent.
Moreover, initial testing of this foam also unveiled that when a wounded patient treated by this product reaches the advance medical facility from the battlefield, it takes surgeons little over a minute to remove this foam from the patient’s internal wounds following incision.
Talking about this new technology Director of Concept Development for the Army Capability Integration Centre at Training and Doctrine Command, Maj. Gen. Bill Hix said, “Potentially, Wound Stasis provides an important addition to our ability to save life and limb.
Getting after these heretofore difficult-to-stabilize, if not untreatable wounds, expands our options and effectively extends the ‘Golden Hour’. A capability like this is important in any operation, but would prove vital during operations in austere areas where military resources and infrastructure are at a premium.”
The inspiring work of Wound Stasis System program also stimulated DARPA and as a result of that they awarded them $15.5 million to initiate Phase II of this treatment system. In addition to this, it is also expected that DARPA will continue to support the Wound Stasis program until it receives approval as a prototype device from the FDA.
Source: DARPA
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