Bloodless heart surgery for infants and children

Blood conservation in cardiac surgery is a team effort, which is accomplished by close cooperation and scientific management of preoperative internal medicine doctors, intraoperative cardiac surgeons, extracorporeal circulation doctors, as well as postoperative anesthesiologists and medical and nursing staff in the monitoring room. The infants and children have even less blood, and the implementation of bloodless surgery is more demanding. Detailed and thorough management procedures must be formulated under the premise of joint consultation, discussion, mutual cooperation and unified understanding by all team members, and the surgeons are required to operate delicately and stop bleeding carefully, while other link personnel do their best to save every drop of blood in order to proceed smoothly. Therefore, the research team led by Peng Gangtian carefully designed, carefully managed and carefully implemented to reduce blood loss in the first place – they actively adjusted the nutritional status of the child before surgery, prevented infection, improved anemia and conserved blood collection. During the operation, a small right axillary incision with less trauma and least blood loss and a small incision with partial sawing of the lower part of the sternum were used to reduce the chance of tissue damage and blood loss, to achieve fine operation, reduce trauma, and avoid heavy bleeding; to stop bleeding carefully, reduce blood destruction, and avoid all avoidable blood loss. Secondly, extracorporeal circulation management adopts bloodless prefilling techniques: ① use miniature extracorporeal circulation lines/materials to reduce prefilling volume; ② negative pressure assisted venous drainage, reduce extracorporeal circulation hemodilution; ③ autologous blood retrograde prefilling to further reduce prefilling volume and maintain higher erythrocyte specific volume and colloid osmotic pressure level during extracorporeal circulation; ④ modified ultrafiltration technique: the connection of the device of modified ultrafiltration technique inevitably occupy a certain amount of pre-charge. In order to improve the technology, we made improvements in the connection method (arterial microembolus apical 1/8 lateral tubing – pump – ultrafilter – stopping fluid 1/8 tubing – right atrium), which effectively reduces the adverse effects caused by its increased precharge volume. Thirdly, we do a good job of blood protection to avoid the destruction of our own blood, and adopt the whole process of blood recovery: every drop of the child’s blood is recovered, washed and returned to the transfusion from the beginning of skin cutting to the postoperative drainage tube removal. Focus on perioperative blood protection to reduce blood destruction and waste: apply protective drugs such as tranexamic acid and 6-aminoacetic acid, pay attention to every detail of blood loss, such as reducing the amount of blood used to do various examinations as much as possible and saving every drop of blood. The most critical of all technical aspects is extracorporeal circulation. While actively learning advanced equipment such as CARDIO PAT blood recovery machine and STOCKETS5 extracorporeal circulation machine, perfusion physicians such as Zhao Hui and Yang Leiyi improved extracorporeal circulation pipeline, used special infant mini-lung and artificial kidney, and worked closely with anesthesiologists and cardiac surgeons to ensure that no abnormal bleeding occurred during the operation, without using any The operation was completed successfully without the use of any blood products. All the children passed the early postoperative period successfully, and were discharged from the hospital with satisfactory peripheral blood indicators and perfect malformation correction on ultrasound review of the heart. The development of bloodless cardiac surgery, especially for infants and children, will greatly reduce the consumption of blood products, avoid adverse events caused by blood transfusion, reasonably reduce medical costs and save limited medical resources. This also marks that our cardiac surgery department has reached a mature level of expertise in surgical techniques, extracorporeal circulation management and blood protection, which will also drive the development of related disciplines such as anesthesia, monitoring and nursing.