Mechanical ventilation of acute respiratory distress syndrome

Ryoichi Ochiai

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) has been intensively and continuously studied in various settings, but its mortality is still as high as 30-40 %. For the last 20 years, lung protective strategy has become a standard care for ARDS, but we still do not know the best way to ventilate patients with ARDS. Tidal volume itself does not seem to have an important role to develop ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI), but the driving pressure, which is inspiratory plateau pressure-PEEP, is the most important to predict and affect the outcome of ARDS, though there is no safe limit for the driving pressure. There is so much controversy regarding what the best PEEP is, whether collapsed lung should be recruited, and what parameters should be measured and evaluated to improve the outcome of ARDS. Since the mechanical ventilation for patients with respiratory failure, including ARDS, is a standard care, we need more dynamic and regional information of ventilation and pulmonary circulation in the injured lungs to evaluate the efficacy of new type of treatment strategy. In addition to the CT scanning of the lung as the gold standard of evaluation, the electrical impedance tomography (EIT) of the lung has been clinically available to provide such information non-invasively and at the bedside. Various parameters have been tested to evaluate the homogeneity of regional ventilation, and EIT could provide us with the information of ventilator settings to minimize VILI.