Brain Cooling Tech Leads New Inventions in Thoracic Surgery

Would any of this be useful in responding to a stroke? We'll never know. 

All my previous research posts on this suggested no useful intervention. Obviously no protocols were ever written on hypothermia so everyone is still shooting in the dark. The result being that survivors are still screwed with no consequences to the doctors who haven't written up protocols on this. Don't you just love incompetence?

• hypothermia (44)

 

 

Brain Cooling Tech Leads New Inventions in Thoracic Surgery

NEW ORLEANS -- Innovations in brain cooling and augmented reality were featured, among other projects, at this year's Society of Thoracic Surgeons meeting.
Following the keynote lecture on technological innovation and entrepreneurship by Mark Cohen, MD, of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, four contestants lined up their pleas for investment in front of judges and audience members at the conference's "Shark Tank" session.
The informal winner was a balloon catheter with a cooling pump that is designed to prevent ischemic injury to the brain during cardiac arrest or stroke. The project won 45% of audience votes (with only 20 people having voted, however).
Brain Cooling
Presenter Robert Schultz, MD, a resident in cardiac surgery at Alberta Health Services in Calgary, said that cooling in aortic surgery decreases strokes by 97% and the question was how to make this available to all surgeons, not just cardiac surgeons.
The device from his start-up, Voyage Biomedical, makes it possible to initiate cooling outside the operating room, cool the head by 10 °C in 10 minutes, and leave the rest of the body warm (never below 32 °C) and the heart beating, Schultz told the audience.
Eventually, the goal is to get the brain cooling device on ambulances and in ICUs. So far, it has been tested in pigs and human cadavers.
A judge during the session, Steven Bolling, MD, of University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, expressed concern about the intellectual property protection on Schultz's cooling balloon pump when he could easily recreate the technology at his own institution.
Nevertheless, Voyage already has enough money offered by investors to get to first-in-human trials by 2023, Schultz said.