Pressure-support ventilation (PSV) is a form of important ventilation mode. Patient-ventilator synchrony of pressure support ventilation can be divided into inspiration-triggered and expiration-triggered ones. Whether the ventilator can track the patient's inspiration and expiration very well or not is an important evaluating item of the performance of the ventilator. The ventilator should response to the patient's inspiration effort on time and deliver the air flow to the patient under various conditions, such as different patient's lung types and inspiration effort, etc. Similarly, the ventilator should be able to response to the patient's expiration action, and to decrease the patient lung's internal pressure rapidly. Using the Active Servo Lung (ASL5000) respiratory simulation system, we evaluated the spontaneous breathing of PSV mode on E5, Servo i and Evital XL. The following parameters, the delay time before flow to the patient starts once the trigger variable signaling the start of inspiration, the lowest inspiratory airway pressure generated prior to the initiation of PSV, etc. were measured.
