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Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive cardiopulmonary disease in which the progressive rise in pulmonary vascular resistance and pulmonary arterial pressure cause gradual right ventricular (RV) failure. To this day, a bilateral lung transplantation remains the only curative treatment option for PAH. Due to the scarcity of donor lungs and the low average life expectancy of the patients, a substantial amount of the patients are unlikely to survive until transplantation. Therefore, a bridge to transplant becomes crucial in order to increase the survival rate of the disease. In this study, the possibility of using pulmonary artery-left atrium cannulated paracorporeal artificial lung (PAL) support as a bridge to transplant for patients suffering from PAH is explored. During this procedure, a low-resistance oxygenator is attached in between the pulmonary artery and the left atrium of the patient, creating a low-resistance branch parallel to the native pulmonary circulation. The influence of performing PAL support is examined by monitoring the patient’s pulmonary vascular input impedance (i.e. the impedance in the proximal pulmonary artery immediately distal to the pulmonary valve), as this provides a measure for RV load. In addition, the possibility of achieving RV unloading and an increased end-organ perfusion (i.e. the blood supply to the tissues) is explored. As these parameters depend on oxygenator characteristics, seven different hollow fiber membrane oxygenators were selected and compared based upon their hemodynamic suitability for PAL support. The experiments are performed in vitro with the use of the hybrid cardiovascular simulator of the department of cardiovascular sciences of the University of Leuven. The simulator is able to mimic the cardiovascular circulation of patients suffering from PAH by making use of a real time lumped parameter model. The oxygenators and their tubing are characterized in vitro by performing physical experiments. Next, their respective lumped parameter models are retrieved from measured data and added to the computational model of the simulator, thus modeling a patient undergoing PAL support. The effects of performing PAL support are examined on four different patient profiles, resembling different stages of progression of PAH. The results from the simulation show that PAL support causes improved end-organ perfusion for every stage of the disease progression. Additionally, RV unloading was achieved under moderate PAH, severe PAH and cardiogenic shock. Increased oxygenator compliance caused a decrease in both oxygenator impedance and pulmonary vascular input impedance, yet no direct correlation between decreased impedance and increased RV unloading was shown by the simulation. From the simulations, RV unloading and increased end-organ perfusion seem to be mainly driven by a decrease in pulmonary resistance, causing the oxygenator with the lowest resistance, being the ILA (Novalung, XENIOS AG, Heilbronn, Germany), to present itself as the most hemodynamically suitable option for PAL support at this moment. Keywords: hybrid cardiovascular simulator, lumped parameter model, oxygenator, paracorporeal artificial lung support, pulmonary arterial hypertension, pulmonary vascular input impedance