Electrical impedance tomography: looking behind the secrets of regional lung function

Excerpt

In Intensive Care Medicine Riedel and colleagues [1] now present a contribution on the utility of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for quantifying regional lung ventilation in healthy subjects during changing body positions and with positive airway pressures. Although appearing fairly sophisticated at first glance, EIT is a technology that has steadily evolved over recent years and has reached a level of robustness and user-friendliness which permits bedside application even in an ICU setting [2, 3]. For this reason clinicians need to pay attention to this promising technique, which may fit perfectly into the range of currently available diagnostic tools for assessing respiratory function in ICU patients. In fact, EIT uniquely permits dynamic visualization of the regional distribution of ventilation over the lungs [4, 5, 6, 7] (see, for example, Fig. 1).

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