Real-time computation of a patient's respiratory effort during ventilation.

Objective: In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to compute the spontaneously generated respiratory effort during ventilation.

Methods: The algorithm computes a ventilated patient's respiratory effort in real-time by analyzing the respiratory pressure and flow signals that are acquired from the ventilator. The method requires an initial period where the patient's respiratory muscles are fully relaxed, for example during or shortly after surgery.