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CASE REPORT article

Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Pediatric Critical Care
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fped.2025.1545230

Monitoring Lung Recruitability During Recruitment Maneuvers in Children with Respiratory Failure on ECMO Using Electrical Impedance Tomography: Case Report

Provisionally accepted
Jan-Christoph Clausen Jan-Christoph Clausen 1,2*Annemarie Krauß Annemarie Krauß 1,2Antonia Schulz Antonia Schulz 1,3,4,5Oliver Miera Oliver Miera 1,2
  • 1 corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Charité University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
  • 2 Department of Congenital Heart Disease - Pediatric Cardiology, German Heart Center of the Charité, Berlin, Germany
  • 3 Berlin Institute of Health, Charité Medical University of Berlin, Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • 4 Department of Congenital and Pediatric Heart Surgery, German Heart Center of the Charité, Berlin, Germany
  • 5 DZHK (German Centre for Cardiovascular Research), partner site Berlin, Berlin, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Currently, there are no clear guidelines regarding the use of recruitment maneuvers in pediatric patients with severe respiratory failure on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), nor is there consensus on how they should be performed. In this report, we describe pulmonary recruitment maneuvers performed in four children with respiratory failure on ECMO (three on VA-ECMO and one on VV-ECMO), all of whom were monitored using electrical impedance tomography (EIT) between March and December 2024. Our findings demonstrate that EIT is a feasible tool for evaluating lung recruitability in children with severe respiratory failure on ECMO. Additionally, EIT aids in distinguishing between responders and non-responders to recruitment maneuvers.

    Keywords: lung recruitment, respiratory failure, Children, ECMO, case report

    Received: 14 Dec 2024; Accepted: 03 Feb 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Clausen, Krauß, Schulz and Miera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jan-Christoph Clausen, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany, Charité University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, 10117, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.