TRAUMA RESEARCH EXTENDS THE ‘GOLDEN HOUR’

Ron Poropatich

When Ron Poropatich left the military in 2012, he wasted no time returning to his alma mater. “The day after I signed out of the Army, I signed in at Pitt,” he says.

The University of Pittsburgh hired Poropatich to direct its Center for Military Medicine Research, which pursues medical advancements for wounded service members and their families. The position seemed almost tailor-made for him.

Poropatich, who earned a BS in biochemistry from Pitt in 1977, spent three years in active duty as a clinical microbiologist in the U.S. Army before taking time to earn his MD. He returned to the Army for another 27 years and rose to the rank of colonel while serving as a pulmonary critical care physician and leading large research programs at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, at Fort Detrick and during deployments around the world.

“I started in July 2012, and I’ve been here ever since,” says Poropatich, who is also a professor of medicine in the School of Medicine. Since then, the Center for Military Medicine Research and its investigators have been major contributors to the University’s growing research expenditures from U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) funding, which has totaled more than $500 million since the center’s launch.

Today, Poropatich is most excited about a development that could save the lives of soldiers wounded in remote, hard-to-reach locations. In a project funded by the DoD, a team of researchers from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University designed an autonomous system to continuously resuscitate patients with severe traumatic injuries. Trauma Care in a Rucksack (TRACIR) uses a computer algorithm to provide life-saving fluids and drugs without human intervention. It could make the difference between life and death during a patient’s long transport to a medical center.

“You only have a short window in trauma care to really make a difference,” says Poropatich, who was the overall principal investigator on the project. “They call that the ‘golden hour.’”

In findings published in April, the team showed how TRACIR could extend that window. The algorithm (called Resuscitation Based on Functional Hemodynamic Monitoring, or ReFit) kept animals with lacerated livers alive for more than three hours as they were transported by helicopter and ground ambulance.

Poropatich envisions TRACIR being delivered by drone to wounded soldiers to get them care as soon as possible. The next step is to test it on human patients. Meanwhile, the team is working on incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into the system to make it more responsive to each person.