Trivandrum’s Shrichitra Hospital has become the first cardiac centre in India to perform a ‘Mini Bypass Resting Heart Surgery’ on a 70 year old patient suffering from severe blockages in multiple arteries with the help of advance heart lung machine.

This advance heart lung machine is called performer CPB which is manufactured by worlds largest US based medical device company called Medtronic.

Performer CPB is ‘fully closed to air’ system and does not allow any interface between blood and air, therefore the chances of infection or an air bubble entering the circuit is also minimal. It is equipped with latest safety features and alarms.

A Mini Bypass Resting Heart Surgery deals with the various challenges of the conventional Bypass surgery and with the help of performer CPB it significantly enhances patient benefits and clinical outcomes in many ways. It is one third the size of conventional heart lung machine hence it reduces the distance of blood to travel on foreign surface; hence the patient tends to less risk of infection.

According to Dr K Jayakumar, Head of Department, Cardio Vascular Thoracic Surgery, Shrichitra Hospital, “The conventional bypass cardiac surgery can be very stressful for some patients, making survival much more challenging for the sickest. Mini Bypass surgery with the help of Performer CPB has big advantages over traditional Bypass surgery. Since it is much smaller, blood flows over far less foreign surface, an aspect of conventional bypass that can be associated with life-threatening physiological or neurological complications. There are several other important advantages too that this therapy offers. I believe it is likely that the mini bypass cardiac surgery will replace the conventional method as the gold standard for most cardiac procedures over time.”

Resting Heart Bypass Surgery is one of the most complex procedures and is performed on patients who suffer from severe blockages in heart. In this the patient’s heart is put at rest and the heart’s function of blood purification is taken over by a machine called ‘heart lung machine’. While surgeon operates on the resting heart, deoxygenated blood is sent to heart lung machine which purifies the blood and oxygenated blood is then sent back to the body. This entire process is called Perfusion.

The conventional Heart lung machine is of huge size and has a long circuit system through which the blood has to travel during perfusion process. At any given time the quantity of blood and other fluids in circulation is approx 1800 ml. Since this circuit is a foreign surface, longer the circuit, greater are the risk factors that the patient is exposed to.

These risk factors can be fatal for the patient and include risk of infection, an air bubble entering the circuit, damage to Red Blood Cells (RBCs) thereby increasing the need for donor blood requirement, fluctuation is patient’s body temperature, flow rate of blood, etc.