The Role of Chest Electrical Impedance Tomography in the Pediatric Ventilator Weaning

Early and successful Extubation is sometimes a difficult combination in children, since the criteria for suggesting it are often subjective and poorly defined. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has been developed and used clinically for more than 30 years. Interest in this technology arose from the need to monitor ventilation and pulmonary perfusion at the bedside. Because it is a non-invasive and non-radiation technology, EIT is very promising in the pediatric population. Objectives: To correlate the data obtained by the EIT during the spontaneous breathing trials (SBT) on a T-piece with failure in the trial and Extubation failure and to observe if the EIT is able to detect the children that will fail earlier than the SBT performed alone. Method: A cross-sectional, prospective study to explore the potential benefits of monitoring with EIT during weaning. Qualitative characteristics will be described using absolute and relative frequencies and the quantitative characteristics will be described using summary measures (mean, standard deviation, median, minimum and maximum). Bivariate and later multiple logistic regression analyzes will be performed to evaluate the influence of characteristics assessed on weaning failure, mainly the reduction in functional residual capacity during and after the weaning trial. For the analysis will be used the software IBM-SPSS for Windows version 20.0 and tabulation of the data will be used Microsoft Excel 2010 software. The tests will be performed with significance level of 5%.