3D printed splitter

3D PRINTED VENTILATOR SPLITTERS

A serious lung condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, is the leading cause of death for COVID-19 patients. In individuals with ARDS, fluid builds up in the lungs, limiting the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream and depriving vital organs of the oxygen they need to function properly. The condition must be managed by a ventilator.

As the COVID-19 outbreak spreads, many health care facilities are grappling with a shortage of the machines needed to treat the sickest patients. Such shortages have already effectively crashed the health care system in Italy, which currently reports the world's highest number of COVID-19-related fatalities at more than 13,000.

Splitting ventilators is an experimental emergency treatment that has been used before under dire circumstances, such as during the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, when splitters were used to stabilize injured but otherwise healthy young adults. But splitting a ventilator to treat multiple patients in varying stages of lung failure presents a new and somewhat daunting set of design challenges, according to Julie Caffrey, assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

"Using the same ventilator settings for ARDS patients with different lung compliances could be very unsafe. One patient might receive too much air; the other might not receive enough," Caffrey explains. "With ARDS, ventilator strategies for improving survival are often used to administer low tidal volume and higher pressure. If you can't manage that, you risk causing further trauma to lungs that are already very crippled. It's very important that when we split a ventilator, we can still set the ventilator to that specific patient."

"The goal here is to quickly get this technology to hospitals around the world—and right to the people who need it the most," says Helen Xun, a member of the team who works on this project and a third-year medical student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Source:

https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/04/02/3d-printed-ventilator-splitters-for-covid-19/

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3D Printing/Medical Masks-Devices/COVID19

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