Background: A recent prospective trial using porcine models of severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) indicated that positive-pressure ventilation delivered by a conventional intensive care ventilator at a moderately high frequency allows safe reduction of tidal volume below 6 ml/kg, leading to more protective ventilation. We aimed to explore whether these results would be replicated when implementing similar ventilation strategies in a high-fidelity computational simulator, tuned to match data on the responses of a number of human ARDS patients to different ventilator inputs.
Methods: We evaluated three different strategies for managing the trade-off between increasing respiratory rate and reducing tidal volume while attempting to maintain the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in arterial blood (PaCO2) constant on a computational simulator configured with ARDS patient datasets.
Intensive Care Med Exp
December 2014
Background: Computer simulation models could play a key role in developing novel therapeutic strategies for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) if they can be shown to accurately represent the pathophysiological characteristics of individual patients.
Methods: We evaluated the capability of a computational simulator to reproduce the heterogeneous effects of COPD on alveolar mechanics as captured in a number of different patient datasets.
Results: Our results show that accurately representing the pathophysiology of individual COPD patients necessitates the use of simulation models with large numbers (up to 200) of compartments for gas exchange.