Imagine trying to slide a slim tube through the side of a rapidly dying person: you dodge the stomach, you narrowly avoid the lungs and heart – all in an attempt to stabilize a fading life. Now imagine performing this procedure amid the turbulence and anarchy of a battlefield. Your patient: a soldier waiting for you to insert a chest tube that will determine whether he lives or dies. The task is daunting, not to say overwhelming—the patient could die instantly if you slip under pressure.
To prevent such an outcome, a Cambridgebased consortium of hospitals and universities known as CIMIT has engineered medical simulation technology that focuses specifically on battlefield emergencies. For decades, doctors and nurses have practiced on test dummies furnished with life-like organs, metallic bones, and simulated blood flow before attempting dangerous procedures in the emergency room. But CIMIT isn’t interested in preparing doctors for hospital work: desperate situations sometimes call for these same procedures to be carried out in uncontrolled, unpredictable, and chaotic settings, far away from the brightly lit, orderly ERs that come equipped with teams of doctors standing by for additional aid and consultation.
When bullet and shrapnel wounds cause soldiers’ lungs to fill with blood, for example, they often require a procedure called intubation to save them from effectively drowning. Until recently, medics have trained for the procedure by either performing intubations on pigs – animals whose cardiopulmonary systems are worlds apart from those of humans – or by simply learning on the job, where lives are at risk.
Soon, however, medics will be able to practice using CIMIT’s “virtual intubation system” – nicknamed Virgil – which, along with smallpox inoculation and laparoscopic surgery, is just one of the simulated procedures CIMIT is making possible.
What makes Virgil unique are its mobility, its versatility, and the rapid trainee feedback it provides. While competitors’ simulators are only designed for use in mock emergency rooms under tightly controlled conditions, CIMIT’s mannequin can be taken almost anywhere. Until now, simulators have afforded little help to combat medics, who require models robust enough for use on a mock battlefield. CIMIT developed Virgil to respond to the US Army’s specific need for combat medic training.
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