Recent Development of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenator

The extracorporeal membrane oxygenator, or termed artificial membrane contactor or artificial membrane lung, is one of the two most important core components in an ECMO system. Its function is to realize the oxygen supply and the removal of carbon dioxide of venous blood, and establish the extracorporeal gas circulation for patient. The artificial membrane oxygenator is one kind of membrane contactors, which is a membrane separation device, using special polymer membrane material as the separation unit. The service life of the artificial membrane oxygenator is generally short, and it is a consumable part in an ECMO system. Due to expensive membrane contactors, the cost of the ECMO system is greatly affected by the cost of this component. At present, there are still many problems in the third generation of artificial membrane lung technology, so it is necessary to further develop extracorporeal membrane oxygenator based on new principles and new materials. Therefore, based on the development history of artificial membrane lung, the development status of artificial membrane lung was reviewed from the preparation of membrane materials, biocompatibility of membrane materials, module design, i.e., the development of membrane, the improvement of biocompatibility of the membrane, the design of contactors, microfluidics artificial membrane lung and other aspects,with emphasis on the research progress of artificial membrane lung based on the principle of microfluidics. Finally, the future development direction of artificial membrane oxygenator technology was prospected, that is, in terms of the traditional hollow fiber membrane contactors, new materials of high gas permeation feature need to be developed and the flow path in the contactors need to be optimized. For microfluidics membrane contactors, the further breakthrough should be remained in scaling up of contactors, improvement of biocompatibility and new fabrication method.