Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation was first invented by John Gibbon in the 1950s, and continued to be developed by Clarence Walton Leahy. Due to the immaturity of purely mechanical extracorporeal support systems in the early days, Lilahai adopted the bold experiment of using a living human being as an extracorporeal support system for a patient, and used it for the first time on a newborn infant in 1965 to test its effectiveness, and it was first used successfully by Robert Barrett, a surgeon at the University of Michigan, for the first time in 1972 in the treatment of patients suffering from acute respiratory distress.