CARS Preview 2018

guide the persons through the procedure and support them. ” Space is a hard place to survive. At some point there is the chance that somebody will get hurt seriously or potentially acquire a disease: there are predictions that on a Mars mission one of the planned six crew members will get hurt seriously. Cypko’s proposed work would enable the astronauts to medically intervene on the spacecraft instead of waiting until they reach Earth. ESA does not conduct primary research on their own. ESA sends out announcements for opportunities to undertake research, such as fundamental studies of life science or technical studies, or other research goals. Cypko adds, " ESA (mainly) does not do R&D but provides R&D opportunities for researchers and industry, and, in the end, relies on them. ESA needs the researcher and the industry. " ESA is cooperating with all the major agencies - with NASA , the Russians , the Chinese and the Japanese . There is a close coordination on the fundamental science and in developing recommendations for space. Yet on deep space medical decision-support systems, there is not much development at all. ESA, like other space agencies, is focused on training astronauts to become medical experts on spacecrafts. Ulrich Straube , a flight surgeon at EAC, was aware that something more needed to be done. Straube contacted Heinz Lemke , and through Lemke he got in contact with Cypko. Together with Leonard Berliner , an interventional radiologist who is active in personalized medicine (see interview in this magazine), they decided to bring the space topic to CARS. Cypko became involved in the project because his former work was related to decision support based on various clinical workflows. General guidelines for medical - particularly pharmaceutical and surgical - treatment exist for the use at the International Space Station, which experts on earth need to adjust to each specific case. Deep space medical problems will require automatically personalized decision and workflow support. For Cypko the first step of a solution would be to develop digital astronaut models. 15 CARS 2018 Preview “ ESA is focused on training astronauts to become medical experts on spacecrafts ” Mario Cypko