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?

In Search of Dr. McCoy's Scanner Wand

Medical imaging in the Star Trek world was far advanced over anything available today. Even so, there are some amazing developments in medical imaging that promise even better technologies in the near future.

This Newswise newsrelease reports on advanced software developed at BYU in Utah, to allow physicians to "call up" 3-dimensional images of any part of a patient's anatomy, from a CT scan, MRI scan, or similar data:

The tool, dubbed “Live Surface” by its creators BYU professor William Barrett and graduate student Chris Armstrong, also has special-effects applications – in similar fashion it can be used to extract a single actor’s performance or inanimate objects from video clips.

“The main goal in developing Live Surface was to give the physician a powerful, practical tool that can be used interactively,” said Barrett, explaining that existing software and techniques that are used to give doctors a look at a patient’s anatomy are either too simplistic or take too long to be of immediate use. “A program like this has to be incredibly fast and very interactive, or else it’s very frustrating for the user, who currently has to go get a sandwich and come back before he has what he wants.”

Live Surface has the additional benefit of allowing users to easily isolate “tricky” anatomy such as soft tissue – blood vessels, hearts and muscles – that a lot of other techniques can’t readily extract, said Barrett.

“The hard stuff (meaning bones) is easy to see using traditional methods, but even there, the simpler techniques sometimes overestimate, underestimate, or fuse joints, whereas Live Surface neatly and accurately separates them,” said Barrett. “Our program also provides more robust isolation of soft tissue, which is quite a breakthrough.”

The BYU software works by extracting information from data collected in 3-D volumes – CT scans, MRIs or 3-D ultrasounds. With a click and drag of the mouse, a user identifies the object he wishes to extract. Next, he identifies those portions of the data that surround the object. Immediately, the desired object is extracted from the data.

“This is the object I want, and this is not the object I want. And in less than half a second, it pulls the object you want out of the data,” said Armstrong, who will present the computer science research behind Live Surface at the International Workshop on Volume Graphics 31 in Boston. “It’s really that simple.”

....After a surgeon had extracted a 3-D image of a person’s heart or brain, for example, the image could then be projected onto the patient’s body, fitted to create a road map for the surgeon as he operated. Additionally, doctors could use the tool to make better diagnoses after visualizing a patient’s organs from multiple angles or do a better job of locating cancerous tumors.

Research for the software was partially funded by Adobe, makers of the popular image-editing program Photoshop. Barrett’s lab has had a long-running relationship with Adobe – Live Surface builds on Barrett’s development of Intelligent Scissors, a program that allows users to quickly pull 2-D objects out of images. The program, renamed “magnetic lasso,” was incorporated into 5.0 and subsequent versions of Photoshop and is used by millions of designers, artists and photographers.

Source.

It is easy to see how this technology would allow a surgeon to "practice" a procedure on a specific individual, using virtual surgery techniques combined with a CT scan or MRI scan of the involved part of the body. Difficult procedures could be stored in software libraries for training surgical residents.

Similar technology is being used to perform virtual colonoscopies, to substitute for the lengthy and uncomfortable screening procedure of colonoscopy using an endoscope. Eventually, a whole body scan might become quick enough, easy enough, and inexpensive enough to provide regular and reliable medical screening for individuals whose genetic tests indicate they are at increased risk.

2nd Star To the Right then Straight on 'til Morning

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? Micah at Event Horizon Blog, pointed to this suite of NASA sites discussing space travel options.

A recent article in the Scotsman newspaper looks at another idea, "AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. " Hat tip to we make money not art.com.

A slightly older article from livescience.com discusses the z-machine as of a year ago.

Burkhard Heim proposed this general concept back in the 1950s. Some friends and I in graduate school developed a mathematical model on paper for this type of drive, but decided it would have to wait for a fusion power source. Reportedly, the Z pinch has achieved some limited fusion reactions when deuterium was added to the experimental apparatus.

Update 6 Jan 06: Here is a link to the New Scientist article that goes into a bit more detail than the Scotsman account.