Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Expandable sponges could seal gunshot wounds like a flat tire


What if you could dress a wound the way you fix a tire? That's the idea behind Xstat Dressing, an in-development technology that would allow medics to easily dress gunshots or other deep wounds on the battlefield — and it was inspired by the foam used to fix flat tires. "That's what we pictured as the perfect solution: something you could spray in, it would expand, and bleeding stops," former medic and RevMedx co-founder John Steinbaugh told Popular Science . "But we found that blood pressure is so high, blood would wash the foam right out."


So instead of foam, Xstat uses small, expandable sponges. The sponges — which are standard medical sponges that have been compressed and coated with a hemostatic agent called chitosan — take...


Continue reading…






via The Verge - All Posts http://ift.tt/1bZH9Zj

No comments:

Post a Comment