Virtual Soldiers? Dream on, DARPA

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60016,00.html

Virtual Soldiers? Dream on, Darpa


By Noah Shachtman |



Heart, lungs, and liver, nerves, veins and bones -- the Pentagon wants to digitally recreate every element of a soldier's body, and embed it all on a chip in the soldier's dog tags.

Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, claim that sometime in the future this Virtual Soldier program could help battlefield medics make quicker, more accurate diagnoses of combat trauma. And that should help save soldiers' lives.


"Every single person in the United States will have an electronic medical record," said Dr. Richard Satava, manager of the Virtual Soldier program and professor of surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"But it's not going to be written," he said. "It'll be an animated, visual representation, based on our own anatomy, our own physiology. And it will change over time."

Don't hold your breath, many medical technologists say. The Virtual Soldier program is, to put it lightly, grandly ambitious, they contend. It'll require unprecedented amounts of money and processing power to realize its far-reaching aspirations.

Satava's idea is to use MRIs, CT scans, X-rays and ultrasound to create a holographic medical electronic representation, or holomer, of a person's body. With a holomer in hand, a doctor will have a patient's base line -- a "before" picture to compare with the current situation.

"When there's a physical injury, it's nice to know what the patient looked like before. A bullet wound that would be fatal in one person might not be in another. The heart could be a bit to the side, or a blood vessel twists in a certain way," said Michael Ackerman, assistant director at the National Library of Medicine.

But Satava sees the holomer as more than a static picture describing the patient's anatomical past. Every sonogram, X-ray or CT scan could automatically update the holomer, offering a detailed picture of what's going on inside the body at that very moment.

Handheld ultrasound scanners, the real world's analog to Star Trek's tricorders, already are in early market stages. Medical monitors to track pulse, body temperature and the like are supposed to be woven into the next generation of soldier uniforms. And computer programs are starting to take a stab at diagnosing patients. Combine these advances with the holomer, Satava said, and combat medics might have instant, automatic diagnoses of the wounded.

The holomer also might be able to use predictive algorithms to look into the body's future.

"You'll be able to do a Dorian Gray for yourself, to show what you'll be like at 65," Satava said.

Any one of these goals is enormously ambitious, medical technology experts say. Taken together, the Virtual Soldier program is "about as advanced (of a) form of medical research as we can jump on," said Gerry Moses, director at the U.S. Army's Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center. "But, in the minds of many -- including myself -- it's doable."

Others are less confident. At University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center, Vic Spitzer has been working for more than a decade on the Visible Human project, a high-resolution anatomical database based on cadavers. His group has spent the last year-and-a-half solely on a computerized model of the knee joint. Sixty-four Pentium processors are needed just to make the digital joint move.

"It's going to take enormous money to do this (holomer), and huge banks of processors," Spitzer said.

After all, Hollywood is sinking fortunes into computer-generated bodies that, with one notable exception, look lame. And that's just showing the skin of these digital characters -- rudimentary, really, compared to representing the tangle of organs, muscles and nerves inside a living, breathing human.

Darpa has drawn heavy criticism in recent months, particularly among civil libertarians, for controversial projects like the Policy Analysis Market (an online trading floor dealing in the possibility of terrorist attacks), LifeLog (an all-encompassing, uber-diary effort) and Combat Zones that See (a surveillance network designed to put an entire city under watch). But the Virtual Soldier effort seems so far out, privacy advocates have reacted mildly.

"It's clearly in such an early phase that we can't even begin to consider these (privacy) issues," Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Lee Tien said.

Satava is convinced that the holomer is closer to reality than people think, however. With the government's full weight behind the Virtual Soldier, he believes it could help medics with automatic diagnoses in 10 years or less.

"This is going to happen much quicker than any of (the naysayers) anticipate," he said. "They have no idea what's available now to us, let alone what's going to be available in the next five to 10 years. They're so far behind the (computer processing) power curve."

Satava also sees connections between the Virtual Soldier and more controversial Darpa projects, like LifeLog.

LifeLog's goal is to capture what a person sees, hears and reads in order to create a kind of computerized, surrogate memory from the information. Paired with a holomer, LifeLog would say "not just what did I do, but what was my health," Satava said. "It's part of the infrastructure to make (the LifeLog) program more meaningful."

Satava's program will start modestly, however, with the modeling of a pig's heart. Researchers, under 18-month grants from Darpa, will scan the heart and create a mini-holomer from those scans.

Then, scientists will run simulations on the virtual heart to see how it reacts to injuries: how long it takes to die, essentially. Once they're reasonably sure their electronic organ is lifelike, researchers will hurt the real pig -- real bad.

Shrapnel will be thrust into the pig. If the holomer is accurate, the living, beating heart will die, exactly like the virtual one did.