Advantage of new ventilation method for cardiopulmonary resuscitation qualitatively captured by simple respiratory mechanics models

Abstract

First responders to cardiac arrest depend on cardiopulmonary resuscitation to keep patients alive. A new ventilation method, phase-controlled intermittent insufflation of oxygen, was previously shown to improve heart perfusion during cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a large-animal study, outperforming the best currently known ventilation method. This paper investigates whether the advantage of the new method can be explained using standard linear lumped-parameter models of respiratory mechanics. The simple models were able to qualitatively capture the improvement.