Is volume inferior to pressure?

The microprocessor has greatly changed ventilator technology. When I started residency, intubation and mechanical ventilation involved assuming complete control of a patient’s breathing. Since then, advances in technology have fed the boundless human desire for improvement and spurred the ambition of engineers to overcome the challenges involved in creating better and better ventilators. The ventilators of today are totally different machines than those we used 3 decades ago. Far more sophisticated, current computer-controlled ventilators can accommodate a large degree of patient-ventilator synchrony. This enables a mechanically ventilated patient to retain a large amount of control over his or her own respiratory system.