Cardiac specialists in Saint John are now performing open heart surgery with what they call a "state-of-the-art" heart-lung machine and are looking to raise the final $100,000 for another.

The new Sorin S-5 cardiopulmonary bypass machine arrived a few months ago and doctors say it helps them deliver some of the best results in the world.

Medical staff at Saint John Regional Hospital do as many as four open-heart surgeries per day or about 750 per year.

Victoria Clarke, the senior development officer at the Saint John Regional Hospital Foundation, said she would like to hit her target to buy one more.

"We're currently at $650,000. So we're looking to raise that last $100,000 to make sure that we're able to purchase that second heart-lung machine," she said.

"You can see it's an excellent piece of equipment and we'd like to make sure that it's here for New Brunswickers."

Tony Maas is a perfusionist, a specialist who uses a heart-lung machine during surgeries that require cardiopulmonary bypass.

"At the first sign of an air bubble, this closes the line," said Maas, explaining some of the features of the Sorin S-5.

"We call them bubbles. Neurologists call them a stroke."

Maas runs the pump and watches the chemistry, flow and temperature on the digital displays as a patient's entire volume of blood passes out of the body while their heart is stopped for surgery.

Maas said, in 20 years, he's never had it so good.

"It was like driving an expensive car. It was just beautiful, smooth, it was responsive to everything I wanted," he said.

"The information was at my fingertips, anything that I needed, it was intuitive to use. It was just beautiful, it's beautiful. I'm gushing I know."

Marc Pelletier, a cardiac surgeon, said no one has to leave the province to get world-class heart care.

Pelletier said people can be confident that, "If I go to the [Saint John] heart centre, I know that they have the best equipment that they would have anywhere else — that if I go there, it's the same as Toronto, Boston, Montreal, Philadelphia, any of those centres and hopefully there's some peace of mind that comes with knowing that."

Pelletier said cardiac surgery has greatly evolved since the first heart-lung bypass in 1953.

The survival rate is now 99 per cent, he said, and methods and techniques are improving all the time.