Researchers to freeze trauma victims in suspended animation to keep them alive

Suspended animation, the stuff central to space travel in sci fi movies, could soon be a reality.

Doctors are set to create a sci-fi technique as they start investigatin the potential of suspended animation - a temporary state of interrupted breathing and loss of consciousness resembling death - to keep people alive by freezing.

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The technique would be tried out on 10 patients who would otherwise be expected to die from their wounds, likely come from stabbings or shootings.

The doctors on the project would be paged when a patient was likely to fit the procedure. One such case is reported every month, and they had a survival rate of less than 7 per cent.

Doctors would start by removing patients' blood, with the patients' body temperature lowered to around 10 degrees Centigrade, and replacing it with a large volume of cold fluid, injected in the body through a tube placed in the aorta, the largest artery in the body, to achieve freezing.

The patients would be clinically dead after the completion of the process.

To revive them, the doctors would use a heart-lung bypass machine to restore blood circulation.

The Independent quoted University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Presbyterian Hospital's Samuel Tisherman, the surgeon leading the trial as saying, they were suspending life, but did not like to call it suspended animation because it sounded like science fiction. He said the researchers were therefore calling it emergency preservation and resuscitation.

The idea behind the experiment at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburg was that rather than find a way for human beings to survive enormous passages of time during space travel as was most commonly used in sci-fi, the practice would eventually allow terminal patients to survive until medical procedures were discovered to help and cure them.

The technique had been tried on pigs in the past, with 90 per cent survival rates. The reawakening process involved resuscitation at a medium speed and those that lived did not demonstrate any physical or cognitive impairment.

However, the human trials formed only the first step to full suspended animation and more scientifc use.