On Friday morning the U.S. Special Operations Command received its first shipment of a medical device that has Birmingham roots and promises to save lives on the battlefield.
The Abdominal Aortic Tourniquet will be used when soldiers or Marines are injured in the pelvis or upper leg by gunshot, shrapnel or a blast, causing a wound that could bleed a person to death within minutes. A medic quickly straps the AAT around the belly of the victim, tightens it with a windlass and pumps in air.
This pushes a balloon into the belly with the force of more than 80 pounds, clamping the abdominal aorta against the spine to cut off blood flow to the legs.
"The idea is you're turning off the faucet," said Dr. John Croushorn, one of the inventors. Croushorn is an emergency department doctor at Trinity Medical Center and a former U.S. Army surgeon, and his start-up company, Compression Works, is based in Hoover.
Four plastic parts of the one-pound AAT are made by Innovative Composite Solutions, a UAB spinoff co-founded by Uday Vaidya, a UAB professor of mechanical engineering. ICS develops and makes high-strength thermoplastic composite components, and it won $100,000 in the 2009 Alabama Launchpad business plan competition sponsored by the Alabama Economic Development Partnership Foundation.
The AAT "soldier saver" was picked as one of the top 10 inventions of the year in the June issue of Popular Science.
Compression Works will ship 500 of the AATs by the end of June, and the device is getting further testing by the Army, Navy and the United Kingdom at the U.S. Army's Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio, Texas.
Croushorn filmed a training video in Hoover last month, using volunteers from metro-area police departments dressed as Army soldiers, with one wounded in the pelvic area and covered with Halloween-store fake blood. The video simulates a firefight, and Croushorn plays the Army medic who straps on the AAT and pumps it up in a minute and a half.
Capability gap
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