Inventions made for war adapted to heal people and help the planet
A live satellite transmission links UW Radiology Professor Alan Rowberg (on phone) to Dave Willis at Advanced Technology Laboratories. They are viewing an arterial blood flow.
As the driver eases the ambulance off the icy highway, an agitated young man comes running from the overturned BMW. Holding his left arm gingerly to his side, he gestures excitedly with his right.
“It’s my wife. You’ve got to help her,” he yells.
The woman sprawled on the ground looks unscathed in contrast to the car beside her, a crumpled tin can of a wreck. But the pain she feels in her abdomen makes it almost impossible to speak.
Without moving the victim, a medical technician reaches in his kit for an instrument that will detect her internal injuries. Like a magician waving a magic wand, he glides a fist-sized scanhead over her abdomen. In his hand a miniature ultrasound machine displays an image from inside her body. As he watches the screen, he recalls that just a few years ago, this particular device was the size of a washing machine and would have been impossible to take to the scene of an accident.
Via a satellite link, the ultrasound images also appear on a screen at a hospital 20 miles away. A radiologist determines that the woman has a ruptured spleen. She is likely to bleed to death before she reaches the hospital.
The doctors radio to the emergency technician to alter the frequency of the ultrasound waves. Now, he directs a beam of high-intensity, focused ultrasound to the site of the bleeding. The flow of blood slows—then stops long enough to transport the woman to the hospital, where doctors rush her into surgery.
For severely injured victims of car accidents, shootings, falls and industrial accidents, the first hour often makes the difference between life and death. While it isn’t here yet, the UW is working to bring this technology to hospitals and medic units across the country.
“The more quickly life-threatening conditions can be diagnosed, the more quickly treatment can start,” says Lawrence Crum of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. “An ultrasound examination can reveal if body organs are distorted because of internal bleeding, where blood may be pooling in the abdomen, if blood is flowing through key vessels and where shrapnel, bone and debris have been driven into the body.”
Figuring out how to provide aid during the critical “golden hour” has been the impetus behind a number of projects involving University of Washington researchers. But the research dollars do not come from federal health agencies as you might expect—they’re from the Department of Defense.
The instruments used in this hypothetical accident could be a reality in three to five years and find their way to both civilian and military arenas, Crum says, which is why they are being funded with defense dollars.
The defense department is funding a $12.6 million project to build a diagnostic instrument small enough to hold in one’s hand. It could be used following disasters, at the scene of accidents or on battlefields. Crum is the leader of the UW team and ATL (Advanced Technology Laboratories) of Bothell, Wash., is the leader of the industrial team.
“Imagine a corpsman as far away as Bosnia making an emergency examination with this new device and sending the image via satellite to a doctor at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C.,” says Steve Carter, a UW clinical associate professor of radiology involved with the project.
UW researchers use a drill to sample the harbor floor near Bainbridge Island to see if microorganisms might be able to help clean up toxic wastes. Photo by James Gray.
While work on the hand-held diagnostic device is just getting under way, research on transmitting images and advice via telephone lines and satellites— called “telemedicine”—has been under way for several years with money from the Department of Defense. A 1995 test proved that ultrasound images could be transmitted in a matter of seconds and cases discussed via satellite links between the UW Medical Center, ATL in Bothell, Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma and a community hospital in Ronan, Mont. Links to the UW Medical Center should, conceivably, work from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
Lt. Col. Dean Calcagni demonstrates telemedicine hook-ups in a defense department lab. Photo courtsey DOD.
The telemedicine work involves a team of researchers from the School of Medicine including Carter, Brent Stewart, Alan Rowberg, Tom Winter, William Shuman and Patrick Freeny. With satellite time provided by NASA, the team also included George Nelson from astronomy.
In non-emergency situations, telemedicine links and the new ultrasound instrument being developed by the UW and ATL could be used to diagnose everything from blood clots to kidney stones to pregnancy problems. Family practitioners, nurse practitioners and others could work via satellite or telephone with radiologists at distant facilities.
The new device dovetails closely with a $10 million defense-funded effort to use high-intensity, focused ultrasound to slow or halt bleeding when people suffer severe trauma, according to Crum. Until now, the emerging field of high-intensity ultrasound has concentrated on using sound waves to destroy unwanted tissue such as tumors. The approach has the advantage of being non-invasive — patients don’t have to go under the knife.
Physicians know that when high-intensity, focused ultrasound kills unwanted tissue, the blood in the surrounding area undergoes changes. During the next five years, Crum will lead UW researchers who hope to develop ultrasound technology that can stimulate coagulation.
“We’re calling the process `acoustic hemostasis,’ sound energy to arrest bleeding,” Crum says. The team working on the project includes the School of Medicine’s Carter, Kirk Beach and Roy Martin, as well as Crum and his colleagues at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
The ultrasound projects aren’t the only ones on campus receiving big bucks from the military. Defense money also pays for projects across disciplines such as computer science, engineering, psychology, aeronautics and astronautics, mathematics, atmospheric sciences and oceanography.
UW researchers use a drill to sample the harbor floor near Bainbridge Island to see if microorganisms might be able to help clean up toxic wastes. Photo by James Gray.
For instance, Oceanography Professor Jody Deming is testing microorganisms to see if they might clean up badly contaminated marine sediments. Bainbridge Island’s Eagle Harbor provides a working lab for her researchers because the harbor floor is part of a Superfund site.
The work by Deming’s team, however, is not being funded by the EPA but by the Office of Naval Research. The basic research under way at Eagle Harbor could find ready application elsewhere in Puget Sound, the state and the nation, including Navy installations and shipyards, Deming says.
Among other things, a series of creosote plants polluted Eagle Harbor sediments with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in concentrations a hundred times greater than current state limits. In some of the worst spots, concentrations are a thousand times greater. PAHs are toxic to all plant and animal life except for certain tiny creatures that not only tolerate PAHs, they eat them. Some of these families of microorganisms have long made Puget Sound —including Eagle Harbor—their home.
Deming and her colleagues are trying to determine which microorganisms may be able to clean the harbor floor, if there are things that could be done to encourage them or things that should be avoided because they will slow or stop the activity.
The research at Eagle Harbor is some of the first in the nation dealing with organisms found in marine sediments. Of the half a dozen institutions working on polluted marine sediments, UW has the largest program and the only one that spans the disciplines of oceanography, microbiology, medical genetics, fisheries, forestry and civil and chemical engineering. Up to 30 undergraduates a quarter have participated in research expeditions or lab work.
The program is being supported in its first five years with $4 million from the Office of Naval Research and the UW’s provost office.
Of all the units on campus, the Applied Physics Laboratory is the largest single recipient of Department of Defense funding on campus—last year receiving half of the $40 million that came to campus. The laboratory has seen major shifts in defense spending during its 53 years as part of the UW.
During World War II American torpedoes that struck their targets often wouldn’t explode. The U.S. government quickly created two applied physics laboratories, one at the UW and the other at Johns Hopkins University, to find out why. During the war, all the UW laboratory’s efforts went into applied research, mostly weapons related, according to John Harlett, deputy director of the laboratory.
Following the war, the lab continued to be nurtured by the War Department (later the Department of Defense) and conducted its program under wartime secrecy, complete with a force of security guards. (The APL building was later to become a target of student demonstrations during the Vietnam War.)
The lab gradually broadened its program, especially in ocean science. In 1969 President Charles Odegaard appointed a special committee to assess the relationship between the APL and the UW. The committee suggested a closer link with academic departments and that the building be an “open” facility.
Soon, experts in high-frequency sound energy looked for civilian uses that could be spun off from research into enemy weapons and submarines. Oceanographers pursued projects into fundamental environmental questions about ocean circulation, storms and the polar ice caps.
Today 250 scientists, engineers, programmers and support staff work at the Applied Physics Laboratory along with 34 graduate students. The laboratory is part of the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences with close ties to the School of Oceanography and departments such as atmospheric sciences and electrical engineering. APL is home to both oceanographers and to ocean engineers who devise instruments and computers needed to explore the seas.
About 85 percent of the lab’s grants and contracts are with the Navy. One-third is from the Office of Naval Research for fundamental oceanography work—research that may never have direct Navy applications. The Navy needs to know as much about the ocean environment as possible because its fleet operates there, Harlett explains. It’s just like the Air Force paying for basic meteorological work.
Even in the face of major changes wrought by the end of the Cold War, money for such work continues today. The laboratory’s funding has remained fairly stable since 1990.
Gone almost overnight was the emphasis on strategic defense against missiles from Soviet submarines in the depths of the oceans, according to Robert Spindel, director of the Applied Physics Laboratory. The top priority now is the ability to deal with limited regional conflicts which may involve land/sea operations in coastal waters. The emphasis is on how systems operate in shallow water, not deep water.
There also was a recognition in the early ’90s that not all the funds allocated for defense needed to be spent in the same way, says Spindel. Researchers across the nation hoped that some of those dollars and some military technology would go to civilian scientists.
One outcome was the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, championed by Vice President Al Gore, to use Department of Defense money for broad environmental research. Among other things, the program provided $35 million for a project involving the UW, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other institutions to establish a global network of underwater transmitters and receivers to detect ocean warming. UW project leaders Spindel and Jim Mercer say that if the oceans are heating up in response to global climate change, the time it takes sound to travel between two points will get progressively shorter because sound travels faster through warmer water.
The scientists rely on many of the receivers originally used to track Soviet submarines. Other civilian scientists use formerly secret networks of receivers in the oceans to monitor such things as sea floor earthquakes and the migration routes of whales. Instead of listening to the enemy, scientists are using the networks to listen to the Earth.
Oceanographers, fishermen and geologists interested in locating minerals are among those taking advantage of maps created using masses of what used to be top-secret data about the ocean floors. Nuclear submarines have been put at the disposal of civilian scientists three times. The lab’s Jamie Morison and Roger Colony were on the first, historic mission aboard the USS Pargo looking for signs of global warming by sampling and assessing the Arctic Ocean and ice pack.
Such broad uses of Department of Defense equipment and money, however, may have already run their course, Spindel warns. As its budget has shrunk, the military has stepped back from many initiatives. The U.S. Navy’s budget, for instance, is half of what it was at the height of Ronald Reagan’s administration. And, unlike some military research, it has proven impossible to wring any kind of peace-time use from existing bombs and weapons technology. There are some swords that will never be turned into plow shares.
Opportunities continue to change. Just last year, an Applied Physics Laboratory group led by Peter Kaczkowski conducted a pilot project that advances the use of pulses of electromagnetic energy to detect and describe metal objects in the ground.
Finding the best ways to discern shell fragments from unexploded ordnance such as bombs, mortars and mines is a key to cleaning up military installations that have been used for testing weapons and training troops, Kaczkowski says. The problem is formidable: Millions of acres have been contaminated with ordnance and explosive wastes, some which penetrated the ground as deep as 10 feet and some that are perfectly capable of exploding if mishandled.
The island of Kaho’olawe, the eighth largest of Hawaii’s islands, is but one of 900-plus sites needing to be cleared. For 50 years the island was used for bombing, rocketry and gunnery practice. Almost every type of conventional ordnance, ranging from small arms ammunition to 16-inch naval gun shells to 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped or fired on Kaho’olawe. Most of these items detonated as intended, but not all. Now the federal government must clean up the 45-square-mile island in order to return it to civilian uses.
It was only after the federal government began earmarking numerous military installations for permanent closure that the military stepped up funding to find the best instruments to detect ordnance and explosive wastes, Kaczkowski says. “This was never a major concern during the Cold War,” he says.
His work has a slightly different twist than projects where military technologies have duel civilian uses: In this case, Kaczkowski believes the military can wring additional information from technology used for years by civilians prospecting for mineral deposits.
What’s particularly ironic, he says, is that the scientists who pioneered this technology 30 years ago were from — where else? — our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.