Buying Time with Artificial Lungs

The membrane lung is an extracorporeal device for exchanging blood gases. By preventing hypoxia and hypercapnia, use of the membrane lung can maintain life while otherwise intolerable pulmonary damage heals. Repair is possible because appropriate levels of extracorporeal support can relieve the patient's lungs of their primary burden of respiratory gas exchange and of the handicaps of conventional therapy: high ventilator pressures and inspired oxygen concentrations. The article by Hill et al. in this issue of the Journal presents an unusual case in which prolonged extracorporeal oxygenation enabled improvement of impaired pulmonary gas exchange and eventual survival. Like all existing . . .