The Kawashima procedure is used for congenital heart disease with a single effective ventricle and an interrupted inferior vena cava (IVC).
[1] Technically it is very similar to the bidirectional Glenn procedure used to direct half the body's venous blood flow into the lungs.
However, in patients with interrupted IVC, most of the blood from the lower body actually joins the blood from the upper body before returning to the heart via the superior vena cava (SVC).
[citation needed] After Kawashima, the only de-oxygenated blood returning to the heart is from the abdominal organs (via the hepatic veins).
However, the hypoxia can worsen over time (because of the development of microscopic AVMs in the lungs that allow blood to pass through without being oxygenated),[2] and therefore these children still may need a complete Fontan procedure in the end.