The use of fuzzy techniques in the study of non-invasive mechanical ventilation therapies

Home mechanical ventilation is a widely used treatment in the medical discipline that improves patient survival in some pathologies. One of the important open problems in this medical field concerns the assessment of patients ventilation state using the reduce number of parameters which can be recorded during patient home permanency. The medical nature of this problem and the lack of structural knowledge about the system makes the use of model-free methods like fuzzy qualitative techniques (fuzzy inductive reasoning methodology) potentially useful. As a first step in this direction, fuzzy clustering techniques have been used and oriented to characterize the available data, make exploratory analysis and study time process dynamics. The preliminary results obtained shows the usefulness of the fuzzy approach to this complex problem and in particular, fuzzy clustering techniques have revealed the nature of patient's ventilation state and their evolution as the ventilation therapy is applied.