Medical advance because of combat trauma.

Lance in Iraq has the following on a temporary lung.

AMEDD looking for FDA approval on lung device

From the SAS:

Spurred by American military doctors’ success with an experimental artificial lung on soldiers wounded in Iraq, officials at the top levels of the Army’s medical command are now investigating U.S. use of the new device, Army officials said this week.

Three American troops have survived severe lung trauma caused by bomb blasts with the help of the machine — called an interventional lung assist, or ILA — said Marie Shaw, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center spokeswoman. Following those reports, Army administrators as high as the branch’s surgeon general’s office have turned their attention to the device, said Cynthia Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the Army Medical Department, or AMEDD...

Roughly the size and shape of several CD cases stacked together, the device keeps people alive by performing the work of the lungs when they are too damaged to function properly.

Compact and transportable, the ILA is used by inserting a pair of heavy-gauge needles into the major blood vessels in a patient’s legs, allowing his heartbeat to push blood through a complicated membrane that filters carbon dioxide out of the blood and infuses cells with oxygen. The blood is then circulated back into the body through the other leg.