Cell saver machine cleans blood and saves lives

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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.

See the article in its original context from December 1987.

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London (LPS): A machine that can save the blood of a patient bleeding in the operating theatre, by sucking it from the wound, purifying it and then reinfusing it back into the patient, has been developed at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, eastern England. The Cell Saver machine can provide large volumes of blood when haemorrhage is dramatic and a blood bank is at some distance. Similar machines have been available on a limited scale for about 10 years, but the version now used at Addenbrooke's works faster than its prototype and during the past four years has been developed to cope with greater and greater blood losses. After sucking blood from the wound as it is lost, the machine then adds the anti-coagulating agent heparin to the save blood to prevent it from clotting. Next it is collected in a reservoir and then carried down into a centrifuge where it is spun. Here red cells are separated and then washed in saline and then completely cleansed are pumped up and reinfused back into the patient.

If the blood were taken directly from the patient and then transfused back again without being cleansed there would be clotting products present in it that could start a damaging chain reaction in the patient. The lungs and kidneys would be the

first organs to suffer. The washing takes away the potentially damaging products and the red cells are returned to the patient without any risk of a reaction. Doctors using the £20,000 machine can process about 250 mls of blood every three minutes but they can collect it and transfuse it at 500 mls a minute into the patient to cope with vast losses of blood.

"We can also link two machines together and cope with much greater rates of blood loss on very special occasions," said consultant anaesthetist Dr. Michael Lindop, of the hospital's Department of Anaesthetics, which has developed the machine.

The sort of patient who can most be helped by this type of machine would be one suffering from an aortic aneurysm, a swelling of the main artery which can sometime rupture and become a dire surgical emergency associated with really large blood losses, said Dr. Lindop.

He continued: "We are making fewer demands on the blood bank in many of the large operations that we do, and where really huge loses are occuring we are buying a lot of time for