Research

Performances of domiciliary ventilators compared by using a parametric procedure

¹ CORIA UMR 6614 — Normandie Université, CNRS-Université et INSA de Rouen, Campus Universitaire du Madrillet, Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, F-76800, France
² ADIR Association, Hôpital de Bois-Guillaume, F-76031, Rouen, France
³ GRHV EA 3830, CHU Charles Nicolle, Rouen, F-76031, France

^* e-mail: emeline.fresnel@coria.fr

Received: 11 January 2016
Accepted: 19 June 2016
Published online: 13 July 2016

Abstract

Background

Noninvasive mechanical ventilation is sufficiently widely used to motivate bench studies for evaluating and comparing performances of the domiciliary ventilators. In most (if not in all) of the previous studies, ventilators were tested in a single (or a very few) conditions, chosen to avoid asynchrony events. Such a practice does not reflect how the ventilator is able to answer the demand from a large cohort of patients with their inherent inter-patient variability. We thus developed a new procedure according which each ventilator was tested with more than 1200 “simulated” patients.

Methods

Three lung mechanics (obstructive, restrictive and normal) were simulated using a mechanical lung (ASL 5000) driven by a realistic muscular pressure. 420 different dynamics for each of these three lung mechanics were considered by varying the breathing frequency and the mouth occlusion pressure. For each of the nine ventilators tested, five different parameter settings were investigated. The results are synthesized in colored maps where each color represents the ventilator (in)ability to synchronize with a given muscular pressure dynamics. A synchronizability ε is then computed for each map.

Results

The lung model, the breathing frequency and the mouth occlusion pressure strongly affect the synchronizability of ventilators. The Vivo 50 (Breas) and the SomnoVENT autoST (Weinmann) are well synchronized with the restrictive model ( and 78 %, respectively), whereas the Elisée 150 (ResMed), the BiPAP A40 and the Trilogy 100 (Philips Respironics) better fit with an obstructive lung mechanics (, 86 and 86 %, respectively). Triggering and pressurization performances of the nine ventilators present heterogeneities due to their different settings and operating strategies.

Conclusion

Performances of domiciliary ventilators strongly depend not only on the breathing dynamics but also on the ventilator strategy. One given ventilator may be more adequate than another one for a given patient.