Mechanical pumps for cardiopulmonary bypass

This chapter describes the historical evolution and implementation of different mechanical blood pumps for the use in heart–lung machines. It starts with the use of blood-filled rubber bulbs that were intermittently squeezed from the outside in order to mimic the pulsatile blood flow that the natural heart generates, and ends with the development of very powerful, high-tech centrifugal blood pumps with extremely low hemolysis rates. It covers Drs. John Gibbon’s and Michael E. DeBakey’s contribution to the field and describes technical details, advantages and disadvantages of several different pump-types used in the past and present in heart–lung machines.