Posted by eccare May 2nd, 2012

Extracorporeal circulation at the Isala Klinieken Heartcentre has evolved immensely over the past 24 years. Initially only perfusion procedures were performed. Nowadays this has expanded to extracorporeal support procedures outside the OR setting as in ECMO or ECLS and bloodmanagement as well.

Also extracorporeal circulation techniques and available materials have changed. At the start an extracorporeal circuit with an open venous reservoir, rollerpump, a shiley m2000 flat-sheet oxygenator with a total priming volume of 2.5L was used.Nowadays this has been replaced with a low-volume (1 to 1.5L) fully coated closed extracorporeal circuit, incorporating a modern fiber oxygenator and centrifugal pump. A lot of effort has been put into making the circuit and perfusion procedure as less traumatic to the patient as possible. We think this has resulted in the current high standard of care which makes it possible to operate on increasingly older and sicker patients with good results in patient outcome.

30,000th patient receiving flowers To celebrate this milestone the patient involved was offered flowers by perfusionist Ad Boogaart and cardiac surgeon George Brandon Bravo Bruinsma after she made her speedy recovery from the cardiac and extracorporeal procedure.