Custom machine kept man alive without lungs for 48 hours
Humans can’t live without lungs. And yet for 48 hours, in a surgical suite at Northwestern University, a 33-year-old man lived with an empty cavity in his chest where his lungs used to be. He was kept alive by a custom-engineered artificial device that represented a desperate last-ditch effort by his doctors. The custom hardware solved a physiological puzzle that has made bilateral pneumonectomy, the removal of both lungs, extremely risky before now. The artificial lung system was […]