The Design and Implementation of a Convertible Extracorporeal Circuit for Lung Transplantation.

Intraoperative management for patients during orthotopic lung transplantation may be performed without mechanical circulatory support, with veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO), or cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). For certain patients, an intraoperative conversion from VA-ECMO to CPB may be indicated. If a VA-ECMO patient requires CPB conversion, the previous model at our institution used two separate machines and was overall inefficient.

Sustained Total All-Region (STAR) Perfusion: An Optimized Perfusion Strategy for Norwood Reconstruction.

Early iterations of the Norwood procedure used aortic cross-clamping, myocardial arrest, and, sometimes, deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. The resulting hypothermia and prolonged ischemia caused frequent cardiac, neurologic, renal, and other end-organ dysfunctions. Our group describes a novel technique, sustained total all-region (STAR) perfusion, which circumvents these issues by providing continuous perfusion to the head, heart, and coronaries at temperatures of 32-34°C.

[Early rehabilitation after cerebral lesions: indications, methods, results].

Early neurological and neurosurgical rehabilitation after severe brain injury of traumatic, hemorrhagic, ischemic, neoplastic, inflammatory, or hypoxic origin fills the gap between acute treatment and traditional rehabilitation services. During the last years, specific treatment modalities began to develop, directed at the key problems of severely brain injured patients: for example, stabilization of vegetative regulation, treatment of spasticity, swallowing disorders, disturbances of perception and communication, coping, and conditioning of the relatives. Procedures are gradually emerging to facilitate assessment, documentation of progress, and results.

[Risk factors for posttraumatic fits and epilepsy].

There is still a considerable controversy about the usefulness of antiepileptic prophylaxis after traumatic brain injury. Overall incidence of posttraumatic fits and epilepsy's is well known, but an individual decision on prophylaxis requires knowledge about the individual risk. We performed a prospective observational study on 612 patients with traumatic brain injury of every degree of severity.