Pressure support ventilation (PSV) is used to assist the breathing of the intubated patient with some pressure from the ventilator. This support aims at avoiding excessive inspiratory effort, while ensuring a certain degree of training of the patient's inspiratory muscle. Avoiding both minimal and excessive assistance is thus important for the optimal care of the intubated patient ensuring a lung and diaphragm protective ventilation with the goal to liberate the patient from the ventilator as soon as possible.
Recently pressure-muscle-index (PMI), an index of inspiratory effort easy to be measured on the ventilator screen, has been proposed to avoid excessive assistance in PSV. This will be the first prospective study testing the effects of setting pressure support based on PMI to avoid excessive assistance on patients recovering from acute lung injury (acute hypoxemic respiratory failure).
>18 y.o.
Invasively ventilated in Intensive Care Unit.
Diagnosed with acute hypoxemic respiratory failure (P/F<300 mmHg).
Breathing on pressure support ventilation.
<18 y.o.
Contraindication for Electrical Impedence Tomography monitoring (e.g. pacemaker, burns, or - wounds limiting electrode placement).
Severe and previously diagnosed neurological and neuromuscular disease.
Psychomotor agitation (Sedation Agitation Scale > 4).