Reports of increasing casualties have continually flooded the news since the Iraq war began in 2003, but the large number of injuries that also result are seldom mentioned. The 2006 Polytrauma Conference, which will take place at Dartmouth from Dec. 3-5, intends to develop improved treatments for soldiers from the Iraq war who suffer from severe multiple wounds.
Dr. Joseph Rosen, a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering and a plastic surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, is the lead organizer of the event.
Rosen, who specializes in reconstructive plastic surgery, said that although the solutions for polytrauma victims are still in development, the conference will present different technologies that could help combat the problems involved with these patients.
"I'm always looking for problems without solutions," he said. Rosen has already done work on facial reconstruction of polytrauma patients, but the conference will introduce technology specifically intended for these victims.
Currently over 100 servicemen in the United States alone suffer from severe polytrauma. These injuries can include missing limbs, brain damage, severe facial disfigurement and impaired vision and hearing.
The number of incidents of polytrauma victims has increased largely because of new body armor, improved combat casualty care and more efficient evacuation procedures on the battlefield. Soldiers who may not have survived in previous wars can now make it back home, but they require serious surgery as a result.
The severity of these injuries is such that doctors must look to robotics for solutions, a situation which Rosen said has led to the concept of "engineering medicine" instead of "biomedical engineering."
Ultimately, Rosen and surgeons like him hope to integrate all of the robotic programs under development, including robotic faces. Arm and face transplants are also currently used as solutions to polytrauma, with approximately 25 arm transplants conducted around the world thus far. Although these surgeries include the risk that the body will reject the transplants, Rosen said that the benefits of the procedures outweigh potential risks in the case of polytrauma victims.
"In the cases of these soldiers, we could do multiple transplants -- two arms, leg and face -- so the risk of immunosuppression would be less in contrast to the benefit of multiple transplants," Rosen said.
Many also see tissue engineering and limb regeneration as potential cures for the future.
The polytrauma conference is not open to the public, but the research that will be covered in the conference is taught in Engineering 5, an undergraduate course. Additionally, the patients' testimonies on Monday night will be open to the public.
