A comparison of turbine-driven mechanical ventilators and conventional ventilators

Turbine-driven mechanical ventilators have some important advantages over conventional ventilators. The most obvious of these is independence of compressed air supply during patient transport, but higher NIV performance due to higher peak flow is also often mentioned. However, there is still a widespread belief that conventional ventilators using compressed air supplies outperform turbine-driven mechanical ventilators in their pneumatic performance. This assumption is, in many cases, based on the inability of the early-generation turbine-driven devices to achieve high peak pressures and to deliver accurate tidal volumes (Mehta S. 2001). In this article we will argue that the pneumatic performance of current turbine-driven ventilators, represented by the HAMILTON-C1, is at least equal to that of conventional ventilators.