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My primary task is to take care of children undergoing open heart surgery and to provide their anesthetic and perioperative care.
Chandra Ramamoorthy, MD
Anesthesiology and Pediatrics
My primary task is to take care of children undergoing open heart surgery and to provide their anesthetic and perioperative care. During heart surgery, the brain of a child is very vulnerable and can be affected both by the cardiopulmonary bypass machine and by the anesthetic agents we use. One thing that we can do to prevent injury is to monitor their brains and what we do here at Stanford is do very non-invasive cerebral oxygen saturation monitoring. What this allows us to do is look at the oxygen levels in the brain and adjust the bypass flow or the amount of oxygen administered to the child to deliver the appropriate amount. It would be sad to have a child whose heart is repaired and functioning really well but the brain is damaged in the process. So, our goal is to monitor to reduce such damage.