Patient-ventilator asynchrony identified with electrical impedance tomography

摘要

Patient-ventilator asynchrony increases work-of-breathing and prolongs patient weaning from ventilator. Inappropriate triggering might sometimes not be recognized via pressure or flow patterns. In the present study, we demonstrated the feasibility to identify the ineffective triggering of the ventilator using electrical impedance tomography (EIT) in a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The patient was mechanically ventilated under assisted-controlled ventilation. Analysis of either global relative impedance-time curves or EIT-derived normalized breathing-cycle-map is able to identify the asynchrony of respiratory time, while the asynchrony was not evident with traditional methods, e.g. ventilator waveforms.