Numerical study of variable lung ventilation strategies

Mechanical ventilation is used for patients with a variety of lung diseases. Traditionally, ventilators have been designed to monotonously deliver equal sized breaths. While it may seem intuitive that lungs may benefit from unvarying and stable ventilation pressure strategy, recently it has been reported that variable lung ventilation is advantageous. In this study, we analyze the mean tidal volume in response to different `variable ventilation pressure' strategies. We found that uniformly distributed variability in pressure gives the best tidal volume as compared to that of normal, scale- free, log normal and linear distributions.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 37th National Systems Conference (NSC 2013; Theme: Systems Thinking in Social Innovation and Emerging Technologies). appears in Chapter 26, pp 299-306, Systems Thinking Approach for Social Problems, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, 327, 201