Submitted on 12 May 2010, Intensive Care Unit, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, Hong Kong

Video. The joyful moment when the ECMO is successfully set up for a patient with human swine flu and significant respiratory failure. Deoxygenated blood is drained out and oxygenated by the ECMO, returned as redder oxygenated blood. Oxygen saturation of the patient improves promptly from <85% on 100% O2 to >95% on 35% O2 within 2 minutes. The lungs are then rested with a high PEEP, low tidal volume and low breathing rate. ECMO is usually required for only 5 to 7 days if it is started early, otherwise too much lung damage will have occurred to be salvageable, or secondary bacterial infection will set in to complicate the course.
Click Read More to see how this circuit is primed with saline. With practice, it takes <15 minutes to prime a circuit.

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Related articles:
F/37 Strive for Breath Under H1N1 Shadow (First case of using ECMO for Human Swine Influenza Respiratory Failure in Hong Kong by United Christian Hospital), also published as 2009 Mar - Extracorporeal circulatory systems in the interhospital transfer of critically ill patients: Experience of a single institution

2010 Jan 25 - How to Start a Veno-Venous ECMO with a Sub-Circuit for CRRT? PYNEH Experience

2010 Mar 20 - Murray Score Calculator

2009 Sep 16 - Efficacy and economic assessment of conventional ventilatory support versus extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for severe adult respiratory failure (CESAR): a multicentre randomised controlled trial

2009 Sep - Critical Appraisal of the CESAR Study on ECMO