Jesse York MS, Kenneth Nugent, MD
Supportive care with mechanical ventilation is the cornerstone of management for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) is often applied in mechanically ventilated patients with ARDS to improve oxygenation; however, determining the optimal PEEP level—the pressure that maximizes clinical benefit while minimizing risks of ventilator-induced lung injury and other harms—for each patient can be challenging. Recently, transthoracic lung ultrasonography (also called lung ultrasound) has been proposed as a tool to guide PEEP determination in patients with ARDS. This paper reviews the history of use of lung ultrasound as a method to guide PEEP determination and the four published studies which compared it to other techniques of PEEP determination, such as the oxygenation and PV-curve methods.
Keywords: Acute respiratory distress syndrome, lung ultrasound, PEEP
Article citation: York J, Nugent K. Using lung ultrasound to guide PEEP determination in mechanically ventilated patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. The Southwest Respiratory and Critical Care Chronicles 2023;11(47):10–20
From: Department of Internal Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, Texas
Submitted: 1/17/2023
Accepted: 4/4/2023
Conflicts of interest: none
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.