LANDSTUHL, Germany — During a firefight in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in 2002, U.S. Army Maj. Kevin Kit Parker stood atop a hill awaiting a Medevac flight for an injured soldier when a bomb exploded several miles away.
He saw the bomb’s intense light first, then felt its shock waves ripple through his body.
“It felt like it was lifting my bowels, and I was quite far away,” Parker said.
Several years later, when he was working in bioengineering research at Harvard University, a friend of Parker’s suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, and Parker was reminded of his Kandahar experience. Parker chose to shift his focus from cardiac tissue to brain research after receiving encouragement from Col. Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist and program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Now a professor at Harvard, Parker has published groundbreaking research describing how blasts injure the brain. Gathering data directly on the battlefield from servicemembers who’ve been in close proximity to blasts, he said, will be key to understanding the devastating yet subtle damage caused.
The military currently is fielding several new technologies in Afghanistan to do exactly that. Now:
● Soldiers are being outfitted with high-tech gauges that can detect a blast’s severity and alert medics on site that a soldier has been exposed to shock waves.
● Armored vehicles are equipped with sensors that connect to each vehicle’s “black box,” which measures and stores information on blasts.
“It felt like it was lifting my bowels, and I was quite far away,” Parker said.
Several years later, when he was working in bioengineering research at Harvard University, a friend of Parker’s suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, and Parker was reminded of his Kandahar experience. Parker chose to shift his focus from cardiac tissue to brain research after receiving encouragement from Col. Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist and program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Now a professor at Harvard, Parker has published groundbreaking research describing how blasts injure the brain. Gathering data directly on the battlefield from servicemembers who’ve been in close proximity to blasts, he said, will be key to understanding the devastating yet subtle damage caused.
The military currently is fielding several new technologies in Afghanistan to do exactly that. Now:
● Soldiers are being outfitted with high-tech gauges that can detect a blast’s severity and alert medics on site that a soldier has been exposed to shock waves.
● Armored vehicles are equipped with sensors that connect to each vehicle’s “black box,” which measures and stores information on blasts.
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A servicemember receives a diffusion tensor imaging scan of his brain at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Diffusion tensor imaging, a variation of MRI, was used in a recent study that showed that servicemembers who were exposed to blasts and diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries were more likely to have abnormalities consistent with nerve damage in two or more brain regions, areas not typically associated with civilian concussions.
Stars and Stripes
Published: November 25, 2011
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