Outpatient use of electrical impedance tomography in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Scoping review

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has emerged as a non-invasive, radiation-free imaging modality that allows monitoring at the patient's bedside, providing real-time information on the regional distribution of pulmonary ventilation. Although there has been increasing research on EIT in Intensive Care Units (ICUs), few studies use this tool in spontaneously breathing patients. The objective is to provide a synthesis of current evidence regarding the outpatient use of EIT in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). A scoping review was developed, extensive research was conducted in seven health-based databases, Scopus, Medline, OVID, Scielo, PEDro, EBSCO, and VHL search portal. This scoping review used the checklist recommended by PRISMA. To assess the quality of the studies, the BEME protocol of "questions to ask about the evidence of an investigation or evaluation" was used. In this scoping review, 7 studies related to the outpatient use of EIT in COPD patients were identified, published between 2009 and 2019. The evidence reviewed allowed to identify that the largest use is related to the evaluation of the distribution of ventilation, the evaluation of regional respiratory mechanics, and the degree of pre-and post-bronchodilator obstruction. EIT is used on an outpatient basis in patients with COPD, as an evaluation tool that complements the information of the clinical results of pulmonary function tests, improving the monitoring of the course of the disease in real-time, non-invasively and without ionizing radiation.