Abstract
Is electrical impedance tomography ready for clinical use in acute respiratory failure? http://bit.ly/30Gjvlt
From the authors:
We read with interest the letter from Frerichs and Zhao regarding our recently published European Respiratory Society (ERS) statement [1]. Frerichs and Zhao noted that, although in the task force electrical impedance tomography (EIT) was considered among the imaging techniques used in acute respiratory failure, no related articles were reported in the final paper. In the report, task force members supported by two methodologists performed a systematic search of the literature on five lung imaging techniques (i.e. chest radiography, lung ultrasound, computed tomography, position emission tomography and EIT) using the same search terms for all the techniques (refer to tables S1–S4 in the ERS statement); according to these criteria we did not report any articles related to the EIT. This is due to the fact that the systematic literature search did not yield results inherent to the application of EIT in acute respiratory failure. In their correspondence, Frerichs and Zhao cited some studies and reviews on EIT. We are aware of the recent systematic review by Kobylianskii et al. [2] and the recommendations by Frerichs et al. [3] on EIT. Yet, the latter were excluded by the a priori choice of including only original investigations. Therefore, in our search, although many articles were found, these were excluded as they did not fulfil all the predefined criteria (e.g. papers on healthy subjects, case series, reviews and papers not focused on acute respiratory failure were excluded).
Regarding the suggestions of Frerichs and Zhao recommending readers perform their own literature search, this is a personal opinion and we recommend adding the recently published ERS statement to the existing knowledge in the field of imaging in acute respiratory failure.
Independently of the specific task force results, we are aware of plenty of physiological and preclinical papers on EIT and we believe that EIT is a useful bedside technique to evaluate both the distribution of the ventilation and lung recruitment/derecruitment.
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Footnotes
Conflict of interest: D. Chiumello has nothing to disclose.
Conflict of interest: G.F. Sferrazza Papa has nothing to disclose.
- Received August 20, 2019.
- Accepted August 21, 2019.
- Copyright ©ERS 2019