Moreover, intensive care unit (ICU) staff experience with PSV is necessary to set the appropriate level of pressure [8,9]. The last decade has seen extensive research being done in the area of wean- ing from mechanical ventilation with well designed randomized controlled trials [10,11]. This has given clinicians data to support effective decision making in weaning. In the recent years several ventilatory support modes have been developed in an attempt to automatically wean patients by feedback from one or more ventilator measured parameters [12]. Volume support, adaptive support ventilation and a knowledge based system for adjusting pressure support have been tried in selected population [13,14]. Adaptive support ventilation (ASV) is an improved closed-loop ventilation mode that provides both pressure-controlled ventila- tion and PSV according to the patient’s needs [15,16].
While there have been descriptions of modes for weaning, including intermittent mandatory ventilation (IMV) and pres- sure support ventilation (PSV), to date no one method has been shown to have a clear advantage [17–19]