Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a powerful treatment for patients with severe heart and lung failure. However, bleeding, thrombosis, and hemolysis are three common clinical complications that limit the application of ECMO. The high rotational speed of the centrifugal blood pump in an ECMO device can cause significant damage to red blood cells. Therefore, calculation and prediction of this damage are essential to evaluate ECMO devices and the associated pathological hemodynamics. In this study, the internal flow and hemolysis rate of an ECMO centrifugal blood pump are analyzed by computational fluid dynamics simulations. Using the discrete phase method, the damage to red blood cells caused by wall shear stress is investigated under clinical working condition of a centrifugal blood pump, and the hemolysis index of the pump is systematically evaluated to be 1.3%. It is found that the pump impeller is the main factor contributing to hemolysis, accounting for 84% of the total in the pump. The systematic evaluation of hemolysis in an ECMO centrifugal blood pump presented here will help provide theoretical support for risk assessment of ECMO systems in clinical application.
Yan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.