Bernhard Dräger Award for research on non-invasive respiratory
monitoring
26 Oct 2010
The Bernhard Dräger Award for Advanced Treatment of Acute
Respiratory Failure has been awarded to Dr Jean-Christophe Richard from
the Red Cross Civil Hospital in Lyon, France.
Dr Jean-Christophe Richard, accepted the prize, valued at €15,000,
during the opening of the 23rd annual congress of the European
Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM).
This year’s prize will be used to support research about
non-invasive respiratory monitoring and its application for the
advanced treatment of acute respiratory insufficiency.
Jean-Christophe Richard will evaluate the bedside use of Electrical
Impedance Tomography (EIT) to help clinicians optimize conventional
and high frequency mechanical ventilation in order to avoid
injurious side effects of this treatment. The study will be
conducted on 20 patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome
(ARDS).
Patient individual protective ventilation
The mortality of patients with ARDS is still as high as 30-50%.
Despite efforts to reduce the injurious side effects of mechanical
ventilation, ventilation associated lung injury (VALI) is still
likely to contribute to this high mortality. General approaches such
as the use of smaller tidal volumes have improved patient outcome
but seem not to be sufficient, particularly in very heterogeneous
lung diseases like ARDS.
Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) provides continuous bedside
monitoring of spatial gas distribution in the lung during
ventilation. Using electrodes on the chest of the patient to measure
changes of electrical impedance during inhalation and exhalation, a
cross-sectional image of the lung can be reconstructed.
If clinicians can see where the gas is going while they adjust
their therapy, ventilation can be optimized for every individual
patient, potentially further improving the prognosis of patients
with ARDS. It is the objective of the award-winning study to
investigate this hypothesis, using computed tomography (CT) as a
reference. CT shows similar information with a higher resolution but
cannot be used continuously at the bedside and exposes patients to
radiation.
Origin of the award
The award is named after Dr Ing. h.c. Bernhard Dräger
(1870-1928), the son of company founder Heinrich Dräger. In just 28
years, he and his father were awarded 261 German, 443 foreign and
912 utility patents. Bernhard Dräger's philosophy was "invention is
an act of imagination, the creation of something new." This award,
aiming to support and recognize the ethos of Dr B Dräger, has been
awarded annually since 2007.