French Doctors to Perform Zero-Gravity Surgery

STFS writes "NewScientistSpace has a story about a team of French doctors who will attempt the worlds first zero-gravity operation on a human aboard an Airbus A300 dubbed "Zero-G". The patient, according to forbes.com, was chosen because of his experience with 'dramatic gravitational shifts' as an avid bungee-jumper. The operation will serve as a test for performing surgery in space."

If thats like the Vomit Comet...

[patio11]

... I predict some serious mishaps for all involved. The Vomit Comet is a NASA plane which they use to simulate 0G conditions by the simple expedient of taking the plane up really high and then flying it towards the ground, then pulling up and repeating. As I recall the cycle between weightless and "really freaking heavy" takes about 60 seconds, with about half of that time being weightless. Any more and the plane ends up as NASA's 453rd "premature interface of craft and planet". So the surgery would be stopping and starting constantly, and as most surgeries aren't five-minute affairs I can imagine that would be a little irksome.

Re:If thats like the Vomit Comet...

[aussie_a]

I've seen footage of people on the Vomit Comet, and for something that's supposedly weightless, it's amazing how much time they spent on the floor of the plane, or drifting towards it. It wasn't really weightless so much as really-really-light.

Zero gravity may be a benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

It may actually be helpful to certain surgeries that their is no gravity .. I am not a surgeon so I dunno. But it just seems there may be occasions where you may want to reach something and mass keeps falling down over it. Also, more than likely they wont have a cheap way of simulating gravity ..in a centrifuge type situation the "artificial gravity" forces actually vary towards the center if you are standing on it .. this too poses a new situation. It may be less expensive to simply know how to deal with the rare instances where minimally invasive surgery is required. Otherwise the mission itself may not happen cause of prohibitive costs.

Nurse, help!

[Acidictadpole]

I wonder what they will do for the Zero-G counterpart to suction, usually on Earth, gravity holds the blood at the base of the operating platform (usually the back) and they have a suction tube designed to remove the blood that gets in the way.. In Zero-G however, the blood may be flying all around the cabin, how would they contain the blood flying around?

ISS

[tonigonenstein]

As others have pointed out, performing surgery 30 seconds at a time doesn't make sense and doesn't reflect the reality of being in micro-gravity during the whole operation. Why don't they do this kind of experiments on the ISS ? It was supposed to be a micro-gravity science laboratory. (Or was it a scheme to maintain 15'000 jobs at NASA ? I don't remember).

...And after the return to gravity?

[Thisfox]

What will the patient be like after returning to gravity?

I seem to remember that in the development of the X-ray a lot of people were treated for depression of the organs, or some such illness, which later turned out to be something that was caused by the machines taking the photographs, and only caused when the photographs were being taken in the first place. Peoples' organs weren't actually in the wrong place, they were being displaced by the heavy equipment, until the equipment went away again...

I can imagine a situation where they do the operation, then land, and find that when the body of the patient settles, the stitches pull out or the organs get twisted around and he has worse problems than he would have had if they'd stayed in a relatively constant gravitational pull.

Let alone the increases and decreases of gravity during the operation. "catch that kidney as it goes past, will you nurse? Oh, nevermind, it will change direction and return to it's rightful place in 5 more seconds..." Wow. It would be like a Monty Python sketch...

Seems worse this way than doing it in orbit...

[Bones3D_mac]

Sure, keeping things close to the earth surface might allow for an easy abort in case of some catastrophic failure, but with the trade-off being that you'll have sharp objects in (and near) your body at constantly changing vectors and accelerations, it hardly seems worth the risk.

While I'm sure they have a fancy plan for blood containment (small incisions and tubes for tool insertion), a slip-up at the wrong time could create some interesting situations (like a stream of small, bloody spheres all over the place). Another issue are the various other fluids to contend with, such as stomach acid, anal leakage and urine. Unless they plan to completely block off every hole on the guy (catheter, stomach pump, intibation tubes, ass plug/vacuum, etc...), this could get messy pretty quick.

Aside from that, what ever became of ideas like one of those large rotating room to create pseudo-gravity using constant angular velocity?

Re:ISS

[tftp]

They don't do it on ISS likely because it makes no sense. They do other medical experiments there, less risky and not so newsworthy - but probably more valuable. Like surgery on rats, for example (I remember something like that being announced some time ago.)

TFA mentions an accident during a low spaceflight. Well, read Baxter's "Titan" for example. But if you are not suicidal enough for that, it might be enough to note that all space crews are trained in medicine; often one crewmember is a doctor, and everyone else is good enough to help.

Another issue is that you can't compare 30-second drops and 9-minute climbs, with gravity swinging from 0 to 2G, and a quiet, stable zero gravity of a spacecraft. Who can do *anything* well in a Vomit Comet? This stunt has no value.

Re:Animals first?

[NMerriam]

If these guys really wanted to experiment (and it is an experiment) with low-gravity surgery they would be doing it on animals long before human trials.

It has been done on animals. I worked with a NASA surgical research group for years and one of the many projects we did was surgical simulation (both computer with haptic feedback and with traditional box simulators) in microgravity. Other groups did surgical procedures on animals in microgravity. We've flown every possible piece of the puzzle, many times. This is the logical next step, and yes it is experimental, but that's what researchers do.

There are many things that could go wrong, and no doubt they'll tell the pilot to level the plane if that happens. Being in control of the gravity makes it a lot safer than trying it for the first time in an emergency aboard the space station. Sooner or later this has to be done -- I admit when I first heard this story on the news, I was hoping it was my old group doing it.

Re:How totally unethical

[ichigo 2.0]

If there is a risk to his life and there is

FTA:
Working inside a custom-made operating block, three surgeons, backed by two anaesthetists and a team of army parachutists, will remove a fatty tumour from the forearm of an intrepid volunteer over the course of a three-hour flight.

I don't really see the risk. He'll probably be in less danger, as the operation isn't performed in a hospital, so no need to be worried of getting an infection resistant to antibiotics from a hospital strain of bacteria. I think the biggest risk comes from the possibility of a plane crash, but I guess that's what the parachutists are for. The operation is so minor that one can almost perform it on oneself. Maybe it's illegal in the US, or something like that, but I really don't see how it's unethical. I could be wrong, maybe the Hippocrates oath states that "you must not perform operations in suboptimal conditions on willing volunteers", but I suspect not.

Re:WARNING

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a huge mistake. (A big one, I'll grant you) The Maginot line wasn't a bad idea, but what they failed to do was spot the fact that in WWI Germany had come through Belgium and that they might try that again. Had they recognised this, they would have built the Maginot line all the way around to the coast (or Built/paid the Belgians to build it through Belgium). The Maginot line itself still took weeks to clear, it was about as effective as a catflap in an elephant house because the Germans just went around.