Normally, when you suffer from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot blocking the flow to your lungs or heart, you’ve only have two options; undergo chest cracking open heart surgery, or die. But thanks to an ingenious new blood filter system, doctors will be able to save lives without destroying sternums or requiring weeks of recovery.
If you combined a Dyson vacuum with a dialysis machine, you’d have a rough equivalent to the AngioVac system from Angio Dynamics, a New York based purveyor of bleeding edge medical equipment. The system essentially hoovers out your blood, filters it for clots, and pumps the cleansed blood back into your body, minimizing the need for transfusions.
The system consists of a cannula and circuit, designed by Angio Dynamics, as well as a number of third party components like the pump and filter. The cannula is serves as the outgoing pipe. It’s inserted into the carotid artery and is threaded through your vascular system into position on one side of the clot. The other end of the cannula is attached to a powerful fluid pump via an inline filter. The pump is switched on, sucking the patient’s blood through the cannula, then the filer, then through the Angiovac circuit that is inserted into the femoral artery and back into the patient’s body. This effectively bypasses the circulatory system and is known as an extracorporeal bypass.