Ignite Award Winner: The Infrascanner helped the Marines save a life

The Infrascanner 2000, winner of the Ignite Lifesaving Innovation Award, has a success story that drew us in immediately. The Infrascanner was being field tested in Afghanistan and Iraq when an Afghan boy was brought to a Marines doctor. His sister had insisted on bringing him after the boy was at the scene of the suicide improvised explosive device. On preliminary examination, a small laceration was found on his head. However, when a positive measurement came back upon examination with the Infrascanner, the boy was quickly evacuated to Kandahar for a full CT scan. The scan revealed a skull fracture and frontal lobe hematoma. Such a serious diagnosis required surgery, which the boy received and to which he responded well.

The Infrascanner, previously profiled in Fortune magazine, solves the problems of intracranial hematomas, which occur often—approximately 40% of the time—during head injuries, and are usually treatable within a time frame, but are extremely hard to diagnose without a large, expensive CT scan. In a combat arena especially, such a machine is hard to come by and impossible to lug around, but very, very necessary.