An American start-up has developed a portable sterile surgery system – which can be fitted in a backpack and set up in minutes – that allows doctors to operate on patients in low-resource situations, and which is already being used in war-torn Ukraine.
It was designed by SurgiBox and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) D-Lab to enable safe surgery in places without sterile operating rooms: earlier this year, about 50 of these were delivered to Kyiv in March as part of a humanitarian mission, reports News24.
The SurgiBox includes a ‘bubble’ with armholes facing inward, a module that filters and controls air flow, and a battery.
It is designed to be compact and lightweight, while also mimicking the environment of an operating room, and the team believes that in the long run, it could be used to conduct surgery at patient bedsides, if they are elderly or especially vulnerable to infection.
It could also be used for mobile surgeries by doctors who attend patients in ambulances, and is also envisioned as an inexpensive alternative to operating rooms for many procedures.
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