Cardiopulmonary Bypass

Excerpt

Cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) answered one of the toughest questions in the history of medicine: Can we operate on human hearts without killing the patient? When heart surgery started, only a handful of conditions were considered feasible for safe performance. This included trauma such as minor tears of the pericardium, heart, and vessels or extracardiac congenital conditions such as coarctation of the aorta and patent ductus arteriosus. The actual start of the new era of cardiac surgery was only achieved when surgeons developed a way to create a bloodless state which enabled the surgeon to open the heart and efficiently repair it without interrupting its essential role, delivering warm, oxygenated blood to the rest of the body's organs.