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>> The fluid shifts investigation is designed
to determine what is causing this microgravity
ocular syndrome.
This changes an astronaut's vision and ocular
structure that some people are calling the
"visual Impairment and Intracranial Pressure
Syndrome."
We think that what's causing this problem
is the headword fluid shift experienced in
space flight.
When there's no more gravity pulling the blood
to your feet, all of the blood and other fluids
in your body circulate in your upper body
around your heart, your neck and your head.
And the purpose of this investigation is to
determine if these headward fluid shifts are
in fact related to changes in brain pressure
and eye structure and vision.
This is a collaborative study using international
partners.
I believe it's one of the largest ever to
fly in the International Space Station.
We have some Russian Space Agency co-investigators
on our experiment and they have a device in
the Zvezda Russian Service Module called the
"Chibis" which is a lower body negative pressure
device which we think would be an effective
countermeasure to these headward fluid shifts
experienced in space flight.
So this is complex in that the Chibis device
is anchored to the Russian portion of the
Space Station because they have medical monitoring
hardware that can't move.
So in order for us to take all of our measures
while undergoing lower body negative pressure,
we have to transport all of our hardware from
one end of the Station to the other.
So this involves multiple crew members, it
takes several hours to transfer the hardware,
to stow it before we use it, and then during
the actual investigation, it requires three
crew members, one of them will be a Russian
either a test subject or an operator or a
medical monitor to monitor the test subject's
vitals during the experiment.
This will indirectly benefit folks that suffer
from Intracranial Hypertension or elevated
pressure in their brain that would normally
require something like a lumber puncture,
an invasive lumber puncture to determine what
the pressure is.
We're investigating many non-invasive modalities
for measuring the intracranial pressure and
if it turns out that these hardware are effective
in doing this, we may save some invasive procedures
for clinical populations here on earth.
I absolutely think this is a stepping stone
towards future missions.
I think if we want to stay in space for longer
than six months and to explore, we have to
solve this visual [background music] impairment
syndrome.
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