Mars or bust: science helps those with the right stuff keep their stuff right

Science News, Nov 26, 2005 by Katie Greene

Crum's solution is known as high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). It's a more powerful and more intensely focused version of the ultrasonic waves used to image babies in a womb. Such waves reflect at boundaries between fluid and soft tissue or soft tissue and bone. A specialized probe placed against the skin detects the reflections, and a computer analyzes them. But, at high intensities, targeted waves can destroy a specific bit of tissue, for instance, cauterizing a blood vessel to stop internal bleeding.

The ancient Egyptians used scalpels to cut out bad portions of our body," Crum remarks. "There's been a lot of progress in medicine, but people still use scalpels to cut out bad portions of the body."

Crum notes that in Europe, China, Japan, Mexico, and several other countries, an HIFU device too large for space is already being used to destroy tumors. It's "becoming the treatment of choice for many forms of cancer," says Crum. In the United States, trials are about to begin for treatment of pancreatic cancer.

On a space mission, Crum envisions the ultrasound device's first order of business being to image a person's internal organs to locate sites of bleeding. Then, an HIFU operator would focus the sound waves on the ruptured blood vessel and increase their intensity to 1 million times that used for imaging. Crum says that HIFU could heat tissue to 80[degrees]C--high enough to cauterize a blood vessel and stop the bleeding.

For hospitals on Earth, a Seattle-based company called Therus Corp. is developing a device based on this principle. It would seal the wound that's produced when a catheter is removed from an artery.

HIFU could do much more than cauterize a blood vessel, says Crum. He envisions it finding and destroying tumors, blood clots, and kidney stones in astronauts visiting Mars. With HIFU, surgical procedures could be completed without exposing a person's internal organs to the environment, thus avoiding infections or the microgravity debacle of body liquids dispersing into the surroundings.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER Whether people venture beyond the moon in the next 30 years or the next 300, the ongoing research to address health issues could still be benefcial. Bone- and muscle-loss studies could reveal new ways to keep elderly people strong and aid recovery of patients who are bedridden or have spinal cord injuries.

Light and sleep research could improve treatments for chronic insomnia and the depression that strikes some people when they lack sun exposure. Discoveries in this area could also reset the body clocks of shift workers. On Earth, HIFU may benefit emergency trauma care and provide noninvasive treatments for blood clots and cancers.

Regardless of the space missions to come, Earth-based spin-offs of space-targeted research are inevitable--if cordless power tools, superalloy golf clubs, and high-tech foam mattresses are any indication. The answers to the current lineup of biomedical space challenges just might slip elements of 22nd-century medicine into the 21st century.