Medgear

A few days back, I was talking about the Mechanical Advantage Tourniquet (MAT), the most preferred device by the army to avert the loss of tissue damage. Now the US military is on the way to develop an Ultrasonic Tourniquet and the concept is named Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation (DBAC). It will make use of the high-intensity focused sound waves to detect and seal the damaged blood vessels by focusing ultrasonic waves at the damaged part to stop the bleeding.



Lawrence Crum, director of the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle said:

Ultrasonic waves are usually innocuous, bouncing off tissue. This is the principle behind sonograms. But when the ultrasonic waves are focused, the effect is radically different. “If you concentrate ultrasound in the same way as light, you can raise the temperature, particularly if the wave is absorbed by the tissue.To achieve this effect, the frequency has to be geared to increase its absorption by the tissue, while the intensity must be roughly one million times greater than imaging ultrasound. When applied to a bleeding wound, the effect is similar to cauterization.