Identification of the Tidal Volume Response to Pulse Amplitudes of Phrenic Nerve Stimulation Using Gaussian Process Regression.

While mechanical ventilation (MV) can lead to ventilator-induced diaphragmatic atrophy due to diaphragm inactivity, electrical phrenic nerve stimulation (PNS) can keep the diaphragm active and therefore prevent diaphragmatic weakness. To quantify the effectivity of PNS, an identification experiment during PNS is presented, and its data is used in Gaussian process regression (GPR) of the tidal volume based on the constant voltage amplitude of the stimulation pulses. The measurements were split into training data of variable size and test data for cross validation. For variable training sizes and different PNS settings, the GPR had a root mean square deviation (RMSD) between 0.39 and 0.91 mL/kg. An identification experiment as short as one and a half minutes was able to characteristically capture the relationship between tidal volume and voltage amplitude. The proposed method needs to be validated in further experiments.