Eli5 how do heart operations work

Question

Let’s say somebody is getting a heart transplant, how do they keep the blood circulating in the body and spilling everywhere?

In: 3

Answer 1

While true artificial hearts have only become available in recent years, people have been performing surgery with a device called a heart-lung machine since the 1960s, and research into the idea had been going on for almost a hundred years before that. Heart-lung machines aren’t really practical replacements for the heart on a long-term basis, partly because they’re too big to place inside the body and partly because the blood gets exposed to air, so you need special drugs to prevent it from clotting. But they can do the job long enough to perform heart surgery, and that’s all most people really need them for.