Air Ambulances Can Now Detect Internal Bleeding Automatically

It looks like air ambulances will soon come armed with yet another interesting piece of technology – one system that can assist in the detection of serious cases of internal hemorrhaging. This is crucial and an important breakthrough, since such capabilities used to be available only at a well equipped hospital, so to have air ambulances sport such a system that does as it is intended to en route to better and more proper medical care is certainly a boon.

This new system is currently being tested on medical helicopters in the Boston area, and it is also a rather simple one since it comprises of no more than your standard patient monitor which will keep track of the heart and respiratory rates, in addition to other details such as blood pressure, where it will remain connected to a computer that does all of the data processing.

Known as APPRAISE (Automated Processing of the Physiological Registry for Assessment of Injury Severity), this system is currently undergoing testing at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) alongside another two trauma centers, in addition to the U.S. Army and Boston MedFlight, the air ambulance service. This means such en route diagnosis and prognosis would be able to lead to better decisions in crucial situations that might just save a life.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Medical
Tags: Science