Editorial: Improving Extracorporeal Life Support Outcomes in Children

Extracorporeal life support (ECLS, also known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO) emerged in the 1970s as a potentially useful life-support therapy for refractory cardiac or respiratory failure in neonatal and pediatric patients (1–3). Following a successful randomized controlled trial of ECLS in neonatal respiratory failure in the mid-1990s (4, 5), ECLS became a standard of care in neonatal and pediatric intensive care medicine.