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Engineers at the University of Washington are working with researchers to create new emergency treatments with a tricorder type device using high-intensity focused ultrasound to seal punctured lungs. According to a University of Washington associate, Shahram Vaezy, although physicists were skeptical because lungs are basically a collection of air sacs, and air blocks transmission of ultrasound - new experiments show that punctures on the lung's surface - are healed with ultrasound therapy.

Although in its early stages, high-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. This means that all doctors will have to do is pass a sensor over a patient and use invisible waves to heal wounds. Researchers are testing the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound with "beams" tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging for different procedures including numbing pain and destroying cancerous tissues.

This promise of "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures suggests that ultrasound could replace painful, invasive procedures. Vaezy stated that with ultrasound lenses could focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on a patient's lungs. This process is similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creating a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. The tissue between the device and the spot being treated is not affected, as it would be with a laser beam. Vaezy also stated that recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes, and more than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published in the Journal of Trauma this summer.

Vaezy and colleagues in the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound in the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory have been developing ultrasound for surgery for more than a decade.