A Technique for Monitoring Mechanically Ventilated Patient Lung Conditions

Diagnostics (Basel). 2024 Nov 21;14(23):2616. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics14232616.

Abstract

Background: Mechanical ventilation is a critical but resource-intensive treatment. Automated tools are common in screening diagnostics, whereas real-time, continuous trend analysis in mechanical ventilation remains rare. Current techniques for monitoring lung conditions are often invasive, lack accuracy, and fail to isolate respiratory resistance-making them impractical for continuous monitoring and diagnosis. To address this challenge, we propose an automated, non-invasive condition monitoring method to support pulmonologists.

Methods: Our method leverages ventilation waveform time-series data in controlled modes to monitor lung conditions automatically and non-invasively on a breath-by-breath basis while accurately isolating respiratory resistance.

Results: Using statistical classification and regression models, the approach achieves 99.1% accuracy for ventilation mode classification, 97.5% accuracy for feature extraction, and 99.0% for predicting mechanical lung parameters. The models are both computationally efficient (720 K predictions per second per core) and lightweight (24.5 MB).

Conclusions: By storing breath-by-breath predictions, pulmonologists can access a high-resolution trend of lung conditions, gaining clear insights into sudden changes without speculation and streamlining diagnosis and decision-making. The deployment of this solution could expand domain knowledge, enhance the understanding of patient conditions, and enable real-time dashboards for parallel monitoring, helping to prioritize patients and optimize resource use, which is especially valuable during pandemics.

Keywords: classification models; condition monitoring; lung; machine learning; mechanical ventilation; pulmonary diseases; regression models.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.