The Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan offers a range of medical treatment options that include robotic prostatectomy, bariatric surgery, advanced cancer treatment, brain tumor treatment and heart care. As part of the Canadian Mount Everest Medical Operations Expedition, the Henry Ford staff was faced with the challenge of performing mock surgery and diagnostics thousands of kilometers away from the hospital. The mission goal was to see if effective remote diagnostics were possible on Mount Everest. If it were to be successful, the same or similar technology could be used for the benefit of astronauts in space who, although faced with different environmental and physical conditions, are also located out of geographic reach of any established health care facility.
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In order to evaluate the extent of injuries such as broken or fractured bones, collapsed lungs, and muscle atrophy, ultrasound is used. A mobile ultrasound machine the size of a large laptop is manufactured by General Electric (GE) and is suitable for expeditions and other extreme environments. While finding the equipment to complete an ultrasound did not pose a problem to the expedition crew, finding somebody who was able to understand and evaluate the output of the ultrasound machine was another story.
In the end, the Mount Everest expedition crew settled on some of the latest techniques in telemedicine and remote diagnostics. The GE ultrasound machine was connected to a VGA2USB Pro video capture device, which converted the video output from the GE machine to a digital format. Then, a MacBook Air laptop coupled with an external satellite antenna was used to relay the images back to Henry Ford via satellite in real time and diagnostic lossless quality.
