Redstate

By PhxG Posted in National Security — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

(h/t US Army and CNET)

FORT BELVOIR, Va. - The commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, the U.S. Army vice chief of staff and other senior Army science and technology leaders will recognize the U.S. Army's "Top Ten Greatest Inventions of 2007.

The Army-wide awards program is dedicated to recognizing the best technology solutions for the Soldier. Nominations for the program were submitted from across the Army laboratory community. Nine of the 10 recipients are elements of the U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Command.

There are some truly great submissions and winners this year. Who can deny that the improved better battlefield communications provided by the RQ-7 Shadow 200 is a potential life-saver, or the XM982 Excalibur; this artillery munitions uses GPS and inertial navigation to pin-point targets; killing the enemy from afar so the troops don't have to do it up close. And when going into battle, why not go in style with a RECCE vehicle system; a mine-resistant ambush-protected"> MRAP vehicle, utilizing the Protector remote-weapon assembly; Gyrocam image sensors; aviation ">Blue Force Tracker technology for identifying friendly forces; and a Robot Deployment System that lets the crew deploy and retrieve a Talon robot without opening the vehicle. These great tools go without saying, they are all amazing devices that aid in the soldiers primary mission, to kill people and break things.

However, ever since the day 2 men took up weapons against each other there has been the potential for being mortally wounded. Depending on the era, a mortal wound could be as simple as picking up a staph infection from a non-killing blow by a dirty knife. Throughout history, the chance of surviving a mortal wound depended on reaching a hospital within the "golden hour" but battlefield situations often do not allow a wounded troop to be immediately evacuated. And since battlefield wounds tend to sever arteries the resulting bleed-out is a huge problem facing any wounded soldier.

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander of the Army Medical Department's Center and School at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio…discuss[ed] lessons learned from the Iraq war at a conference of medical service officers assigned to Europe.

Better body armor, forward-deployed surgical teams and swift medical evacuations are factors that have raised the survival rate [to 90%]. But the most significant change, has been the performance of medics and combat lifesavers in applying trauma care techniques.

The three great threats to body-armored soldiers who receive traumatic wounds are blood loss from damaged limbs, sucking chest wounds and obstructed airways, Weightman said.

Until recently, medics trying to stop hemorrhaging from limbs were to try four or five different techniques before resorting to a tourniquet. The belief was that a tourniquet, once applied, made amputation necessary.

"As a result", "we lost many patients because they bleed to death.'' The Army no longer teaches that the critical period for a trauma patient is the first "golden hour'' after injury, far more important are the "platinum 10 minutes."

"If we can keep them alive for that first 10 minutes then, by and large, we've got a little more time -- an hour-and-a-half to two hours -- before they have to have definitive surgery," [emphasis mine] Weightman said.

And here we arrive at the 10th award winner in this years greatest Army inventions: Damage Control Resuscitation of Severely Injured Soldiers. "The invention is aimed at saving severely injured Soldiers with non-compressible injuries, meaning internal injuries that cannot be compressed using a tourniquet or other device".

The ISR focused its attention on severely injured Soldiers after analyzing data from an autopsy study, which showed that 79 percent of service members killed in combat died of hemorrhage, and 70 percent had an injury that couldn't be compressed. "We needed to find a better way to stop bleeding," Dubick said. "In theater, there was no solution for people with non-compressible injuries."

The innovation involves the fluid resuscitation process, which is when IV fluids and blood products are used to stabilize a patient's physiology. "The body has only a finite amount of clotting factors, and a large volume of fluids can dilute those clotting factors, which reduces their ability to slow down or stop the bleeding."

Under the new standard of care, fluid resuscitation with salt solutions is limited, which keeps the blood pressure from rising too high and "popping" newly formed blood clots. Additionally, blood volume is restored using plasma as the primary resuscitation fluid, along with packed red blood cells.

But rather than using the standard of four times the amount of red blood cells to plasma, "we use a ratio of 1:1 of plasma to red blood cells," Dubick said.

Dubick said early use of a clotting factor called rFVIIa has also been beneficial. The factor is normally used for hemophiliacs but has proven beneficial for severely injured warriors. Additionally, other blood products, such as platelets and cryoprecipitate, are used as needed.

The reduction in fluids not only increases the patient's short-term chances of survival, but also the long-term treatment since "there is less fluid built up in organs and surgeons have a better field of operation," Dubick said.

While the innovation is gaining recognition stateside, the invention has already had a striking impact downrange on the survivability of severely injured Soldiers in the field, decreasing the mortality rate from 65 to 17 percent.

The impact of this change in the standard of care is so striking, Dubick said, that "some liken this standard of care to the first time someone applied antibiotics."

Digest that for a minute; a standard of care equal to the first time someone applied antibiotics.

Improving the survivability of the American soldier one improvement at a time.