Neuro-respiratory drive
In clinical practice, monitoring of the electrical activity of inspiratory muscles may facilitate in identifying patient-ventilator asynchrony [To our best knowledge, this is the first study examining several neuro-respiratory drive parameters of the diaphragm and ICM in MV pediatric patients. We found that EMGBased on our results, EMGThe neural respiratory drive is best represented by measured electrical activity of the diaphragm [Remarkably, in our study diaphragmatic EMG parameters showed values less than 100% of baseline. The higher levels of diaphragmatic electrical activity during baseline measurements might be explained by patients being agitated from instrumenting them for the data acquisition, since the diaphragm responds to an acute increase of respiratory load. However, accessory inspiratory muscles including ICM are recruited by a prolonged increased work of breathing, explaining possibly that EMG levels of ICM were not lower than baseline levels.