1926

Heart-Lung Machine

Sergei Brukhonenko (1890–1960)

The idea of replacing someone’s heart with a donor heart seems nearly impossible. And so does heart repair, for example to fix a valve. The reason is because we all believe that when a person’s heart stops beating, the person dies. In order to allow heart surgery to occur, engineers had to find a way to create a bridge over death, to keep the person alive while his or her heart is not beating. So engineers created the reliable heart-lung machine.

A heart-lung machine, developed by Soviet scientist Sergei Brukhonenko in 1926, is a device that takes over the pumping and oxygenating functions normally performed by a person’s heart and lungs. The machine has to be able to do this, often for several hours, without in any way damaging the person’s blood cells. There is also one other twist—the device needs to be able to connect in quickly and easily.

Engineers have solved all of these problems and heart-lung machines are used in hospitals hundreds of times each day.

The basic idea is simple and has four parts. There is a connection—a tube—usually into one of the heart’s arteries or a femoral artery, to take blood from the body. A blood-friendly pump pulls the blood into the machine. A membrane system allows oxygen to flow into the blood and carbon dioxide to leave the blood. The blood is often cooled, which lowers the person’s metabolism and therefore the need for oxygen. And then the freshly oxygenated blood flows back into the person’s body through another tube.

Once the heart-lung machine has been installed, the person’s heart can be stopped for repair, or even removed and replaced with an artificial heart. This is the truly impressive thing about the engineering of the heart-lung machine—it is able to take over a task that is vitally essential to human life for a period of time, giving surgeons the window they need to do their work.

SEE ALSO EKG/ECG (1903), Dialysis Machine (1943), Artificial Heart (1982), Surgical Robot (1984).

Heart-lung machine in a cardiac surgery.