BACKGROUND Aerosol delivery through an endotracheal tube during mechanical ventilation of small animals, simulating neonates and small infants, has shown to be influenced by a variety of factors including aerosol generator type, droplet/particle size, ventilator circuitry and ventilation regime. A review of the literature indicates that reported aerosol deposition rates in rodents are quite low...

Inhalation exposure models are becoming the preferred method for the comparative study of respiratory infectious diseases due to their resemblance to the natural route of infection. To enable precise delivery of pathogen to the lower respiratory tract in a manner that imposes minimal biosafety risk, nose-only exposure systems have been developed. Early inhalation exposure technology for infecti...

Diagnosis and prognosis of tumorigenesis are generally performed with CT, PET, or biopsy. Such methods are accurate, but have the limitations of high cost and posing additional health risks to patients. In this study, we introduce an alternative computer aided diagnostic tool that can locate malignant sites caused by tumorigenesis in a non-invasive and low-cost way. Our hypothesis is that exhal...

BACKGROUND A practitioner questioned whether moisture that collected in the ventilator circuit and spacer affected the delivery of aerosol from a pressurized metered-dose inhaler (pMDI). An in vitro model was used to quantify the impact of accumulated humidity in a pMDI spacer and ventilator over time. METHODS A ventilator with an adult heated-wire ventilator circuit and humidifier was set to...

INTRODUCTION Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has recently seen increased use in the design of pharmaceutical inhalers. The use of CFD in the design of inhalers is made difficult by the complex nature of aerosol generation. At present, CFD has provided valuable insight into certain aspects of inhaler performance, though limitations in computational power have prevented the full implementation...

Pulmonary drug administration requires direct delivery of drug formulations into the lower pulmonary tract and alveoli of the lung in the form of inhaled particles or droplets, providing a distinct advantage over other methods for the treatment of respiratory diseases: the drug can be delivered directly to the site of inflammation, thus reducing the need for systemic exposure and the possibilit...

BACKGROUND Therapeutic inhaled aerosols are often delivered to spontaneously breathing tracheostomized children. Although aerosol delivery can be affected by several factors, no recommendations for device/drug formulation choice are available. We hypothesized that practice modalities will vary among different institutions. METHODS The respiratory care departments in institutions in the Unite...

PURPOSE Aerosol inhalation therapy is one of the methods to treat rhinosinusitis. However the topical drug delivery to the posterior nose and paranasal sinuses shows only limited efficiency. A precise sinusal targeting remains a main challenge for aerosol treatment of sinus disorders. This paper proposes a comparative study of the nasal deposition patterns of micron and submicron particles usin...

Clinical experience since many years has shown that aerosol inhalation is an established route for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. In contrast, treatment of systemic diseases by means of aerosol inhalation is a novel therapeutic approach. This was caused for a long time by a lack of accuracy, efficiency, and reproducibility of the administered drug doses due to a poor knowledge of the phys...

BACKGROUND A substantial percentage of the aerosol produced by a nebulizer is lost down the expiratory limb of the ventilator circuit. We describe a method for the capture, return, and re-aerosolization of that undelivered aerosol. METHODS We designed an expiratory-limb setup in which an "entraining jet" of gas accelerates unused aerosol and propels it toward an impaction surface. The deposit...