What happens if an astronaut gets sick or injured in space?
On the moon, you're over three days away, or on Mars you could be as much as eight months away.
Not everybody on a crew to Mars is going to be a physician.
You have to be able to operate autonomously.
Dr. George Pantalos and the team at University of Louisville are working with NASA,
Carnegie Mellon University, and Baylor College of Medicine
to develop novel ways to perform complicated procedures
in near-zero gravity.
When you're working in weightlessness, it completely changes how you interact
with your instruments, how you interact with your supplies and equipment, how you interact
with your patient. Whoever is providing the care has to be somehow or another fixed in place,
as does the patient, so that you can interact with them successfully and safely.
In addition to overcoming the challenges of weightlessness, the team has to consider the
size, shape, and efficiency of medical tools.
You can only take so much with you given the thrust capabilities of the launch vehicle,
the power, the volume available for storage in the spacecraft, and everything.
As we're starting to anticipate using a robot as a surgical assistant during a spaceflight,
might we need to redesign some of the surgical tools, both to make them easy for the robot
to identify visually, as well as to pick up with their fingers, and to then hand it to
the surgeon when the surgeon needs it, or to manipulate the instrument themselves?
George and his students have brainstormed and built several answers to the challenge
of space medicine, from fluid containment to 3D-printing.
When we’re working in weightlessness, especially when we’re doing new procedures and working
with new materials, and materials that might be hazardous, we want to make sure
that they don't get out into the rest of the environment.
A glove box is a container that you put an object in to keep it from getting away, simply put,
or to provide special treatment. We've had to create a very brand-new glove box that
will fit in the size limitation of the suborbital spacecraft.
During surgery on the earth, you might have one instrument to provide suction, you might
have another instrument to provide cautery. We've created an instrument that combines
all of those things together, so in one instrument the surgeon, at the push of a button,
can do suction, irrigation, illumination, and eventually will be able to do cautery.
We've developed a hemispherical dome, that you can put over the location of where the
surgery is going to take place to contain surgical fluids. With wound waste recovery,
the idea is to recover all of these fluids and try to filter it and treat it. The output
from that would be drinkable water, sterile water, or sterile saline.
Which sounds gross, but could help support astronauts on long term space missions.
For an exploration space mission, there will be some kind fabrication module onboard that
can 3D print plastics, polymers, metals, tissue, electronics, and hybrid materials. Those materials
can be recycled and put back into the source material storage to 3D-print for some other
tool, or a replacement part that might come up needed later in the mission.
Once George and his team are ready to test out their new designs, they’ll travel to
the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they’ll test their tools
on the NASA zero-G plane.
The preparation for a test flight with NASA is pretty intensive, but once you get up in
the air and you actually start to see things work, that's when things get really exciting
and lots of fun. Working in weightlessness is such a unique experience,
even though it's challenging, it's also very pleasant.
Though it takes several years for the designs to be tested and approved by the FDA,
George’s research is paving the way for safer and more feasible human space travel.
If we can accomplish this kind of medical care during an exploration space mission,
there is a good chance we could do it, let's say, on a lunar colony that's been established
for visitors to come and visit the moon.
Now, as it turns out, medical tools and instruments and monitors that are going to be used in
spaceflight could potentially be very beneficial
to make surgical procedures back on the ground go a lot better.
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