A new method to detect patient-ventilator interactions in critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation

In order to study the interactions between critically ill patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation and the machine, CIBER Researchers from the Critical Care Unit of Parc Tauli in collaboration with researchers from the Althaia Foundation, IRBLleida and BetterCare developed a new non-invasive approach based on non-linear methods in order to better characterize those in a group of patient who were clinically ready to be liberated from the ventilator and in a group of patients who remove the endotracheal tube by themselves.

The main findings were that the non-linear method was reliable, with high sensitivity, specificity and accuracy to detect patient-ventilator interactions whenever they become complex, and that those interactions occur more frequently in patients who were successfully liberated from the ventilator. These findings could be an important indicator about the need of developing smart algorithms in order to detect in real time and eventually predict outcomes.

These results were presented during the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine in Berlin, and during the Annual Meeting of CIBERES (Centro de Investigaciones Biomedicas en Red Enfermedades Respiratorias) in Madrid.