Focused Energy Beam Surgery

Remember Dr. McCoy's diatribe against 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV "The Voyage Home(1986)"? Using focused energy beams, some surgeries may avoid the scalpels and suture that McCoy hated so much.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

..."You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy said. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

The findings suggest that ultrasound might replace what is now a painful, invasive procedure. Lung injuries are relatively common because the chest is a big surface that's often exposed to crushing or puncture wounds, said co-author Gregory Jurkovich, chief of trauma at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and a UW professor of surgery. A busy trauma room like Harborview's, he said, admits about two patients with bleeding lungs per day.

...The new research shows that in these difficult cases, high-intensity focused ultrasound applied from outside could stop bleeding and air leaks. Vaezy and colleagues in the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound in the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory have been developing ultrasound for surgery for more than a decade, concentrating on frequencies in the 1000 to 10,000 hertz (cycles per second). The device producing the ultrasound rays, about the size of a golf ball, is inserted into a handle that doctors use to scan the outside of the body. Previous experiments used the tool to seal blood vessels and stop bleeding in the spleen.

..."Doctors will scan the body from the outside, recognize where the injury is, focus the beam on the injury and use the beams to seal the wound," Jurkovich said. The futuristic medical technology's promise is substantial, he said. "It would be non-invasive and it would stop the bleeding from the outside. When it happens, that's going to revolutionize how we would care for some of these injuries."

Source

Not really so far from the scanner wand and medical tricorder, eh?