| Modern iron lung designed to address ventilator shortage |
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| Sanatate |
| Duminică, 12 Aprilie 2020 12:35 |
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British engineers are developing a modern version of the Negative Pressure Ventilator (NPV), more popularly known as the "iron lung," to provide COVID-19 patients under the care of the NHS with a simple, inexpensive alternative to ventilators.
One of the resources that is in critically short supply for treating COVID-19 patients in need of respiratory support is ventilators. They help to support breathing in people whose lungs have been heavily affected by the virus, but these machines face a number of problems. The most obvious difficulty is that ventilators are in short supply across the world as health authorities scramble to secure enough to meet the current and estimated demand as the pandemic spreads. They are also complex, expensive, require monitoring by trained personnel, and are dangerous to use on even healthy people because they require the patient to be intubated and sedated, and sometimes even paralyzed.
Such Intermittent Positive Pressure Ventilators (IPPV), as they are formally known, work by means of positive pressure. That is, they pump air or oxygen directly into the lungs as a way to help a patient breathe. The iron lung is essentially the opposite. First suggested in the 17th century, an iron lung, in its classic form, is a large, airtight cylindrical chamber big enough to hold a person, whose head sticks out at one end through a special collar. Inside the chamber is a diaphragm hooked to an electric motor. As the motor turns, it operates a crank that causes the diaphragm to expand and contract. As it does so, the volume inside the chamber becomes larger and smaller, causing the air pressure to rise and fall. This causes the patient's chest to expand and contract, allowing them to breathe even if they are totally paralyzed.
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