Quantitative Issues in Cancer Research Working Seminar

Kimberly Greco
Doctoral Student, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard University

“Roller versus centrifugal blood pumps for pediatric extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)”

ABSTRACT: Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life support technology used for the management of cardiopulmonary failure. ECMO circuits incorporate either roller or centrifugal blood pumps to achieve circuit flow and support cardiac output. Since 2010, the use of centrifugal pumps in pediatric medicine has increased with technological advances and ease of use; however, recent clinical and registry-based studies have found higher rates of complications in small children supported with centrifugal pumps relative to roller pumps. Using the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) registry, we evaluated the association of blood pump with in-hospital mortality among smaller (10kg) and larger (10kg) children. We implemented a combined imputation, inverse propensity weight, and bootstrap approach to account for institutional variability in treatment patterns and obtain valid estimates of treatment effect.