A new system for acquisition and analysis of diaphragm echographic images and respiratory signals during spontaneous breathing and mechanical ventilation

Diaphragm analysis with real time ultrasound imaging is an important tool for monitoring respiratory activity: several studies have been carried out in order to provide, starting from ultrasound images, diaphragm thickness and displacement reference values. However there are not studies in which a continuous diaphragm monitoring is performed. The aim of this thesis is to develop a system, usable with the support of any ultrasound machine working in B-Mode, able to synchronously acquire images from ultrasound machine itself and data from available sensors. Besides it must be able to perform an offline analysis and provide numerical values indicative of diaphragm thickness or displacement, in order to assess diaphragm functionality during breathing. The system here developed is composed by a hardware device which acquires, samples and sends to the PC data and images, and two software tools, expressly developed with Processing programming language, which manages respectively synchronous sampling and offline elaboration, returning diaphragm thickness and displacements values over the time. Initial in vivo tests were carried out on 9 adult healthy subjects, while tests on hospitalized patients under mechanical ventilation were conducted at San Gerardo hospital (Monza, Italy)