Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of blood salvaged after extracorporeal circulation (ECC) in paediatric heart surgery. Study of biochemical, morphological and structural variations of RBC after ECC and after salvaging of ECC circuit priming blood.

The salvaging of ECC circuit priming blood is essential for reducing the morbidity related to homologous blood transfusions and the importance of this technique is inversely proportionate to the age and weight of the child. In infants, the washing and centrifugation of blood not only drastically reduce the risk of contracting blood-transmitted diseases and cut management costs, but are also of considerable hemodynamic importance, producing a rapid normalization of the patient's hematocrit and hemoglobin and balancing the O2 consumption/demand ratio. The marketing of miniaturized salvagin devices with 55 ml bowls by Dideco has made possible the recovery of small quantities of blood, so as to normalise the hematic crisis and permit the application of total hemodilution in low-weight patients.

Mononuclear cell (MNC) concentration from the marrow harvest by automatic system.

The availability of reliable and standardizable procedures with low contamination risk and less prominent loss in MNC, would solve the existing perplexities about the systematic use of this passage. We tried to experiment Areman's et al protocol that utilizes the CS 3000 blood cell processor without gradient, making some changes and comparing the results with those achieved with the COBE 2991 on Ficoll. Some aspects should be defined, but the preliminary results are undoubtedly of great interest.