Surgery via satellite

CAMP DOUGLAS, Wis. - Practicing medicine in a war girth presents a problem: too many trauma patients, too small in number trauma surgeons on site to treat them. Tuesday at Volk Field, military doctors and supply with nourishments tested a 21st-century solution to that dilemma: bring trauma surgeon still in the states into operating expanses oceans away. Live. On a TV guard "Jetsons" style, using a lightning-fast satellite Internet connection that can travel from St Louis to the Sunni Triangle in les than a next to the first

An exercise at Volk Field upon Tuesday involved a visiting medical team treating a high-tech mannequin - clean with heartbeat, puke and vital current - while guided via satellite by the agency of a trauma surgeon at St Louis University in Missouri.

Cameras in the operating latitude allow the onscreen surgeon to diocese the patient, the doctors and monitors that record vital information.

"Since the number of trauma surgeon in the military is quite depressed we need a way to throw the knowledge of trauma surgeon here to doctors there," said Col Jim Fike, an Air Force doctor without of Washington, D.C., and director of the experimental exercise.

The training was individual component of a massive Patriot training exercise at Volk Field, a Wisconsin Air National Guard base. The annual two-week exercise was move swiftly by the Air National Guard and involved more than 1600 military personnel including National Guard soldiers and airmen plus coalition multitudes from the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands.

It was the next to the first consecutive year Volk Field has entertainered the training, which included joint operations in medicine, military intelligence, air operations and public affairs, plus numerous battlefield operations. Many soldiers and airmen there have serv at least individual term in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more tours awaited

Fike said military doctors will continue to trial the remote-surgery technology, and if it demonstrates more effective at improving survival rates than general methods, it could be used in "month not years."

And he dioceses broader implications.

"Imagine a car accident victim in a rural area without a trauma hospital nearby," he said. "This practice would allow general-practice doctors to link with surgeon at a trauma center"

And in trauma, fast care matters greatest in quantity medical staff said. "There's a of gold hour (where care is greatest in quantity critical)," said Lt. Col. Robert Bell, a physician assistant and Air National Guard member in St Louis. "This technology may allow us to compres that timeline."

Copyright La Crosse Tribune Jul 26 2006

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