Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

A life support technique that pumps a patient's blood outside the body through an artificial membrane that adds oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, substituting for the lungs, the heart, or both when they are too damaged to sustain the body on their own. Blood is drawn from a large vein or artery through a cannula, passed through the oxygenator and a pump, and returned to the body, allowing the lungs or heart time to rest and potentially recover from an acute illness or injury that would otherwise be fatal. The technique grew out of the heart-lung machines developed for open heart surgery in the 1950s, adapted during the 1970s for longer term support of patients, including newborns with severe respiratory failure, who could not be sustained on a machine built only for the few hours of an operation. Because it requires specialized equipment, continuous anticoagulation to keep the blood from clotting as it passes through the circuit, and a trained team to manage it, the technique is generally reserved for the most severe cases of heart or lung failure, used as a bridge either to recovery or to a further treatment such as transplantation.