Estimating respiratory effort: a systematic model analysis

Assessment of respiratory effort is essential during mechanical ventilation, especially in patients suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a non-invasive, model-based approach for continuously monitoring inspiratory effort. However, the optimal model for the widespread, but challenging case of ARDS patients remains unclear. Hence, we evaluated models of varying complexity combining pneumatic and sEMG measurements for 16 patients. The complex models best describing our data do not improve estimation results with a simpler model reaching similar performance, likely due to increasing susceptibility to multicollinearity for increasing model complexity.