Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 28, 2026

A Microfluidic Model of Biomimetically Breathing Pulmonary Acinar Airways
Published on: May 9, 2016
Liquid ventilation
Qutaiba A Tawfic1, Rajini Kausalya
1Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, Sultan Qaboos University Hospital, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman.
Abstract:
Mammals have lungs to breathe air and they have no gills to breath liquids. When the surface tension at the air-liquid interface of the lung increases, as in acute lung injury, scientists started to think about filling the lung with fluid instead of air to reduce the surface tension and facilitate ventilation. Liquid ventilation (LV) is a technique of mechanical ventilation in which the lungs are insufflated with an oxygenated perfluorochemical liquid rather than an oxygen-containing gas mixture. The use of perfluorochemicals, rather than nitrogen, as the inert carrier of oxygen and carbon dioxide offers a number of theoretical advantages for the treatment of acute lung injury. In addition, there are non-respiratory applications with expanding potential including pulmonary drug delivery and radiographic imaging. The potential for multiple clinical applications for liquid-assisted ventilation will be clarified and optimized in future.
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