BACKGROUND Mechanical ventilator circuits are commonly changed at 48-h intervals. This frequency may be unnecessary because ventilator-associated pneumonia often results from aspiration of pharyngeal secretions and not from the ventilator circuit. We compared the ventilator-associated pneumonia rates and costs associated with 48-h and 7-day circuit changes. METHODS Ventilator circuits were ch...

Patient-ventilator interaction is a key element in optimizing mechanical ventilation. The change from inspiration to expiration is a crucial point in the mechanically ventilated breath, and is termed "cycling." Patient-ventilator asynchrony may occur if the flow at which the ventilator cycles to exhalation does not coincide with the termination of neural inspiration. Ideally, the ventilator ter...

Abstract Automated Patient-Ventilator Asynchrony (PVA) detection and classification has been described previously, however most approaches target specific asynchrony types, are not applicable in non-invasive ventilation, require manual pre-processing, removing the opportunity for real-time analysis. During our previous study of polysomnography-assisted NIV implementation (Hannan 2019), each par...

BACKGROUND Choosing the correct ventilator settings for the treatment of patients with respiratory tract disease is quite an important issue. Since the task of specifying the parameters of ventilation equipment is entirely carried out by a physician, physician's knowledge and experience in the selection of these settings has a direct effect on the accuracy of his/her decisions. Nowadays, decisi...