I'm just finishing up a chapter in my DARPA book on the Trauma Pod project.

Last month I visited the project's headquarters at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where I snapped this picture of the robot surgical system at the heart of the program.

Rick Satava, an Army surgeon, started what became Trauma Pod at DARPA in the 1990s. He left DARPA for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command just before a successful Phase I demo at SRI last year.

What you see here is a modified da Vinci Surgical System (developed at SRI and commercialized by Intuitive Surgical) poised over a fake patient, with a robot scrub nurse awaiting instructions in the foreground. Phase I answered the question "can a robotic system treat wounded soldiers in the battlefield?" with an unqualified "Yes."

Next steps: take the remote human surgeon out of the loop by completely automating several of the most essential trauma operations, and then shrink this stuff down to a size that can roll on an armored personnel carrier or fly in a black hawk helicopter.

The goal is to enable soldiers on the battlefield to load wounded comrades into the trauma pod and have the system go to work immediately patching up hemorrhaging blood vessels and collapsed lungs, buying precious minutes in which to get to a field hospital.

Battlefield trauma surgery is just the beginning, Satava tells me. He envisions a day when surgeons compose operations on computer systems much the way writers like me use word processing software to write articles.

Here I am test-driving SRI's latest surgical robot, the M7, in a photo by SRI public relations consultant Deborah Lacy. Just like word processing? Let's just say it's a good thing there wasn't a real patient on the table. You can see the instruments I'm remotely manipulating on the monitor behind my head.

Satava's surgeon of the future (50 years from now, Satava figures) would work on a three-dimensional representation of a patient created from a head-to-toe CT scan. After perfecting the operation, he or she would hit a command to "print" the procedure on the actual patient. As Satava put it to me:

You...send the image to the surgeon. He spends a few minutes and gets...exactly what he wants without damaging the patient--being able to edit it and then just send it out--and bing, bing, bing, it’s all done by the robot immediately.

The advantage, says Satava, will be surgery done up to 12 times faster and 15 times more accurately than by an unassisted human surgeon. In other words, a procedure that takes an hour in today's operating rooms could be shaved down to just 5 minutes.

Labels: DARPA, Michael Belfiore, Richard Satava, SRI, Trauma Pod

I've just posted my reporting on last night's 50th anniversary celebration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency on the Popular Science website at PopSci.com.

Labels: DARPA, Popular Science

One of the fascinating projects I'm researching for my book about DARPA is the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. I recently spoke with DARPA's program manager for the project, Army Colonel and intensive care unit doctor Geoffrey Ling, who filled me in on how the program came to be and his goals for it.

Ling was on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when he treated a young boy who'd lost an arm and a leg to a Russian land mine. That's what planted the seeds in his mind for what became Revolutionizing Prosthetics. That, and an encounter with a young American soldier in Iraq who wept when Ling told him his million-dollar wound would get him sent home.

As Ling explained it to me, the goal of his program is a "brain-controlled arm that functions at the level of capacity of an arm, that looks like an arm, that weighs like an arm, and also gives you sensory feedback just like your arm would, and we want it within four years."

The clock started ticking in 2005 and now the arm is due in 2009. The work is going on at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. That's a prototype the group produced last year. I'll get a full update on current progress at a massive, convention-style meeting of all the participating researchers in Maryland later this month.

Meanwhile, just to hedge his bets and get something in the pipeline even faster, Ling created a two-year arm project, now finishing up work at Dean Kamen's DEKA Research (of Segway Human Transporter fame).

Ling calls this one the strap-and-go arm."You wake up in the morning, you put it on, and off you go. It doesn't require hooking up to your brain or anything like that, it's a strap-and-go arm. So we recognize that the strap-and-go arm will not be as dexterous and as functional as the brain controlled one but it needed to be a whole lot better than the hook that's available today--you know, the thing out of Peter Pan?"

I reported on DEKA's arm last year, and I'm due for an update. Ling says progress since then has been amazing. "It's a fantastic arm," says Ling. "Mike, you have to see it to believe it." I'm there.

Labels: DARPA, Revolutionizing Prosthetics