A fully portable, semi-automatic mechanical heart-lung substitution system and method. The system includes a venous cannula adapted for insertion into the vena cava of the patient and an arterial cannula adapted for insertion into the right and/or left common carotid artery of the patient. The venous cannula is attached to a roller pump used to pump blood from the patient's right heart to a membrane oxygenator. The speed of the roller pump is automatically controlled by means of a pressure sensor that is attached to the outer wall of the venous cannula so as to sense the internal venous blood pressure inside the patient's vena cava. Blood flows from the oxygenator to a compliance reservoir which expands so as to create increasing pressure within the reservoir as the volume of blood filling the reservoir increases. Blood pressure within the compliance reservoir serves as the filling pressure for a pulsatile left heart pump such that the stroke volume of the left heart pump is automatically controlled so that the volume and rate of oxygenated blood returned to the patient is substantially the same as the volume and rate of venous blood pumped out of the patient. Oxygenated blood is returned to the patient's arterial system through the arterial cannula. The entire system then filtered and can be transported by hand for use outside the environment of a hospital facility.
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