Impact of extracorporeal circuit prime volume reduction on whole blood sequestration during acute normovolemic hemodilution for adult cardiac surgery patients.

Acute normovolemic hemodilution (ANH) is a blood-conservation method in which whole blood (WB(ANH)) is sequestered into blood collection bags before the commencement of surgery. However, for cardiac surgery, extracorporeal circuit (ECC) priming techniques limit the amount of blood that may collected prior to the actual initiation of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). In this study, computational modeling was used to examine the effect of reducing extracorporeal "pump" prime volume (PPV) on WB(ANH) prior to the CPB.