The Virtual Soldier Project Showcase
Baku, April 25 (AZERTAC). The DARPA Virtual Soldier Project has investigated methods that will revolutionize medical care for the soldier. The project developed complex mathematical models to create physiological representations of individual soldiers. These holographic medical representations (known as Holomers) can be used to improve medical diagnosis on and off the battlefield.
The Holomers coupled with predictive modeling software, will facilitate a new level of integration in medical procedures. The Virtual Soldier provides multiple capabilities, including automatic diagnosis of battlefield injuries, prediction of soldier performance, evaluation of non-lethal weapons, and virtual clinical trials.
Penetrating wounds to the thorax and its organs are a major contributor to injury and mortality in the combat setting. The purpose of this proposed project is to transform the way we view, study, and interact with information about the human body and its complex and interrelated systems, and in doing so create an applied system that will revolutionize medical care to the soldier. The ultimate goal is the construction of a complete, functioning, accessible simulation of the human thorax-from the physiology of individual cells to the operation of entire organ-tissue systems. This virtual representation of the human thorax will provide capabilities to diagnose battlefield injuries, specifically ballistic wounds to the heart. The proposed field deployable system will be aware of empirical normal anatomical variability among soldiers` hearts, physiological parameters, and other critical thorax anatomical structures/variabilities. It will also contain the range of effects that penetrating thorax wounds have been observed to engender in previously healthy hearts. In the resulting field system, general prior knowledge of this sort will be unfolded into steadily more precise estimation of the particular parameters of damage, and will aid in the prediction of outcomes and suggest treatment measures for particular ballistic trauma cases.
The ballistics/clinical team will provide key guidance for developing a credible, predictive heart model with relevance to the medical practitioner in the far forward combat setting. To this end, we have involved the new U.S. Army Ballistics laboratory at Ft. Sam Houston, and world experts in trauma and ballistic modeling from Porton Down in the United Kingdom; USUHS, and elsewhere. Data will be made available from public and private databases of combat injuries from Europe, Israel and the U.S.
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