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Updated: Jul 4, 2025

Investigation into Deep Breathing through Measurement of Ventilatory Parameters and Observation of Breathing Patterns
Published on: September 16, 2019
Detection and quantitative analysis of patient-ventilator interactions in ventilated infants by deep learning
David Chong1, Gusztav Belteki2
1Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, The Rosie Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Cambridge, UK.
Background:
The study of patient-ventilator interactions (PVI) in mechanically ventilated neonates is limited by the lack of unified PVI definitions and tools to perform large scale analyses.
Methods:
An observational study was conducted in 23 babies randomly selected from 170 neonates who were ventilated with SIPPV-VG, SIMV-VG or PSV-VG mode for at least 12 h. 500 breaths were randomly selected and manually annotated from each recording to train convolutional neural network (CNN) models for PVI classification.
Results:
The average asynchrony index (AI) over all recordings was 52.5%. The most frequently occurring PVIs included expiratory work (median: 28.4%, interquartile range: 23.2-40.2%), late cycling (7.6%, 2.8-10.2%), failed triggering (4.6%, 1.2-6.2%) and late triggering (4.4%, 2.8-7.4%). Approximately 25% of breaths with a PVI had two or more PVIs occurring simultaneously. Binary CNN classifiers were developed for PVIs affecting ≥1% of all breaths (n = 7) and they achieved F1 scores of >0.9 on the test set except for early triggering where it was 0.809.
Conclusions:
PVIs occur frequently in neonates undergoing conventional mechanical ventilation with a significant proportion of breaths containing multiple PVIs. We have developed computational models for seven different PVIs to facilitate automated detection and further evaluation of their clinical significance in neonates.
Impact:
The study of patient-ventilator interactions (PVI) in mechanically ventilated neonates is limited by the lack of unified PVI definitions and tools to perform large scale analyses. By adapting a recent taxonomy of PVI definitions in adults, we have manually annotated neonatal ventilator waveforms to determine prevalence and co-occurrence of neonatal PVIs. We have also developed binary deep learning classifiers for common PVIs to facilitate their automatic detection and quantification.
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