DTC Overview

Traumatic injuries suffered in diverse civilian and military settings such as attacks on gatherings, accidents, natural disasters, and combat may be fatal if not quickly identified and treated. Medical responders use triage procedures to rapidly prioritize casualties for immediate LSIs, such as treatment of significant bleeding and management of airway injuries. Triage is difficult under any circumstances, but mass casualty incidents (MCIs) in complex settings pose significant challenges to current triage capabilities. For example, overwhelmingly large numbers of casualties relative to medical resources on-hand; dangers to first-responders on the scene, such as unstable infrastructure, contaminants, or hostile fire; and environmental factors that make casualties harder to find and assess, such as rubble or darkness, may prolong the response. Medical personnel may miss the time window for implementing LSIs. 

Further complicating triage in such events is poor scientific understanding of early physiological response to traumatic injury. Physiological features that indicate the need for LSIs in patients who do not exhibit obvious signs of serious injury are not well established, impairing decisions about allocation of medical resources at the scene and the types of facilities where casualties should be sent for treatment.

In summary, there is an immediate need for triage tools to support medical decision-making that can scale to MCIs. In response, DARPA is releasing the DARPA Triage Challenge (DTC) which will use a series of challenge events over three years to spur development of novel physiological features for triage. The DTC aims to drive breakthrough innovations in identification of physiological features ("signatures") of injury that will help medical responders perform scalable, timely, and accurate triage.  DTC seeks to enable medical responders to save lives in MCIs by 1) exploiting stand-off sensors to rapidly and autonomously provide information needed in primary triage, and 2) providing continued monitoring to predict need for LSIs in secondary triage DTC will focus on life-threatening conditions that medics are trained to treat, including hemorrhage and airway injuries.

The DTC will bring together communities with expertise in triage and emergency medical response, tactical combat casualty care, trauma physiology, and a diverse array of sensor and algorithm technologies that will live beyond the DTC and continue to deliver innovative technologies that support medical responders. To encourage broad participation across disciplines, the MTC includes both real-world and virtual competitions. Tracks are available for both DARPA-funded and self-funded teams.