Assesment of Usefulness of Ventil Device for Mechanical Ventilation in ICU Patients

During Covid-19 pandemic many patients require mechanical ventilation due to disastrous impact of SARS-CoV-2 on lungs. In several countries there is a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators. Critically ill patients are treated outside ICUs. Doctors are facing ethical dilemmas who they should treat with ventilation, who should receive ventilator and who should but will not.

Before pandemic in ICUs there had always been patients who required mechanical ventilation because of extrapulmonary reasons as well as palliative cases or those in vegetative condition. Most of these patients require just a simple ventilator, not a sophisticated mode of ventilation. Some attempts to invent a device that could replace complex machines in patients with anticipated poor outcome have been made. Ventil was used in clinical scenarios for separate lung ventilation with good effect. VENTIL device, a flow divider, theoretically allows for independent, fully automated synchronous ventilation of 2 patients with use of only one respirator. In the shortage of respirators (ex. terrorist attack, natural disasters) device allows also to ventilate in classical system two patients using single respirator.

Ventil - independent lung ventilation system was constructed by engineers from Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of Polish Academy of Science. Ventil was tested in the clinical scenario - it's safety had been confirmed. Several years ago the working prototypes of the device, after approval of Ethical Committee, was tested in about 150 patients, who were ventilated with independent synchronous lung ventilation and had been found useful.

The idea of the study is to check the usefulness of the device (modern version) in ICU patients who can be ventilated with volume -controlled mode of ventilation as an attempt to use single device for ventilation of 2 patients. At this moment, according to several scientific societies, sharing mechanical ventilators should not be attempted because it cannot be done safely with current equipment. However, it is possible that using a designed flow divider will allow safe ventilation in patients without needs for complicated modes of ventilation. Then maybe it will be possible to release some ventilators and to use them in patients in severe condition, mainly in the era of extreme ventilator shortage. In the study Ventil will ventilate one patient and instead of the second, there will be an artificial lung. Tidal volumes, minute ventilation, PEEP set and final will be checked. Ppeak, Pmean, Pplat, Cdyn, airway resistance, EtCO2, Sat O2, HR, SAP, DAP will be monitored (every 2 hrs), as well as blood-gas analysis (every 8 hrs)