Advanced Support Technology
NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital has one of the best infant survival rates among neonatal intensive care units in the nation.
Complex birth defects are a key focus of our fetal and newborn medical teams. Among the advanced procedures we offer are:
Dr. Richard Polin and Dr. Ganga Krishnamurthy
CPAP
Continuous Positive Airway Pressure is a technology we deploy to manage respiratory complications to assist infants who cannot maintain adequate oxygen levels. NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and NewYork- Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center are known worldwide for the development of this gentle ventilatory support pioneered by our doctors in the 1970s.
Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) remains a major source of morbidity and mortality for extremely low birth weight infants. The frequency of chronic lung disease in premature infants treated in our unit is the lowest in the United States, and we have been recognized by the National Institutes of Health for our contribution to respiratory care of preterm babies.
ECMO
Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation is an artificial heart and lung that supports oxygenation until a baby’s heart defect can be corrected or failing lungs can function on their own. Columbia physicians at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital (formerly Babies Hospital) participated in the earliest development of ECMO, making our facility one of the first in the world to use this life-saving technology successfully in infants with severe reversible cardiorespiratory failure unresponsive to conventional therapies. Today, we have the largest ECMO program in the New York Metro area. Approximately 20 of our newborns require this specialized technology each year.
Our neonatal team delivers some of the best survival rates in national and international comparisons. Both our pediatric and adult ECMO programs have earned platinum level Center of Excellence status from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO), a consortium of healthcare professionals and scientists dedicated to the development and evaluation of novel therapies for the support of failing organ systems. Our pediatric program is one of only four worldwide to be awarded this status.
EXIT
Extra Uterine Intrapartum Treatment is a life-saving surgical procedure used to deliver babies with congenital airway compression or obstruction. NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital is one of a handful of centers with the depth of expertise to perform this procedure. An EXIT is a joint procedure involving multiple specialties, including Maternal-Fetal Medicine, Neonatology, Pediatric Surgery and Otolaryngology. NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital typically performs two to three EXIT procedures each year. When carefully planned, EXIT procedures should have minimal maternal morbidity and generally result in good neonatal outcomes, but should be performed at a hospital with both adult and pediatric specialists who can care for both mother and child at delivery and after birth.
BRAIN COOLING
Our neonatal specialists use the CoolCap device to prevent brain injury and improve neurologic outcomes in some oxygen-deprived newborn babies. In early clinical trials performed at our hospital, birth related neurodevelopmental disability was significantly reduced from 66 percent to 48 percent by the cooling and there was a trend to a reduction in mortality in cooled infants.