Study of the respiratory pattern variability in patients during weaning trials

Mechanical ventilators are used to provide life support in patients with respiratory failure. One of the challenges in intensive care is the process of weaning from mechanical ventilation. We studied the differences in respiratory pattern variability between patients capable of maintaining spontaneous breathing during weaning trials and patients that fail to maintain spontaneous breathing. The respiratory pattern was characterized by the following time series: inspiratory time (T_I), expiratory time (T_E), breath duration (T_Tot), tidal volume (V_T), fractional inspiratory time (T_I/T_Tot), mean inspiratory flow (V_T/T_I), respiratory frequency (f), and rapid shallow breathing index (f/V_T). The variational activity of breathing was partitioned into autoregressive, periodic and white noise fractions. Patients with unsuccessful trial presented a tendency to higher values of gross variability of V_T/T_I and f/V_T, and lower values of T_I. The autocorrelation coefficients tended to present higher values for T_I, T_I/T_Tot and V_T/T_I. During both successful and unsuccessful T-tube test uncorrelated random behavior constituted > 75% of the variance of each time breath components and represented 50 to 70% in the breath component related to V_T. Correlated behavior represented 6 to 21% in time components and 28 to 50% in component related to V_T.