Monitoring Lung Disease Using Electronic Stethoscope Arrays

Respiratory support is a lifesaving therapy, but it also augments the risk of contracting complications attributable to the endotracheal tube, positive pressure ventilation, or sedation. It is essential to develop strategies to optimize respiratory support in order to minimize the development of these complications. Management of such patients is difficult because the underlying pathologies are dynamic and unstable. Recent evidence has shown that lung protective ventilation strategies lead to dramatic improvements in patient health by reducing ventilator induced lung injury (VILI) 1 . To protect against VILI, many novel modes of ventilation have been developed; however clinicians have difficulty choosing optimal ventilation parameters, because patients' lungs are highly heterogeneous and change rapidly. The instruments currently available either don't provide regional information (ie SpO2), or temporal information (ie Xray CT) 2 .