New Frontiers: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBO) in Open Heart Surgery’s Complications

Modern open heart surgery has been made possible by development of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). It is almost impossible to know who first had the idea of diverting the blood circulation to an oxygenator outside the body and pumping it back to the patient in order to allow surgery within the heart, but surely the first successful operation in which the patient was totally supported by CPB was done by Gibbon in 1953. Afterwards the field of cardiac surgery using CPB began to expand and is presently safely and widely practiced.