Motion compensation technology could enable surgery on moving organs

As a milestone in medical history the invention of the heart-lung bypass machine is up there with the discovery of antibiotics or the mapping of the human genome.

First used in 1953 by US surgeon John Gibbon, the machine ushered in a new era of open-heart surgery. Procedures once considered impossible became routine. And almost 60 years later it is firmly established as the critical tool in a heart surgeon’s armoury.

But despite its pedigree, the technology is not without risks. Bypass machines can degrade the quality of a patient’s blood and potentially hamper recovery from surgery. While more critically, the process of reperfusion - when the surgeon restarts the heart and reintroduces blood to the tissue - has been linked with damage to the heart, strokes and neurological problems.

In an effort to reduce these risks, heart surgeons are increasingly looking at ways of operating on the heart without resorting to bypass machines. While the list of procedures where this is feasible is currently short, a new generation of robotic devices able to compensate for organ movement could soon enable specialists to perform a variety of operations on a patient’s still-beating heart.