Computers in biology and medicine
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Noninvasive mechanical ventilation is an effective procedure to manage patients with acute or chronic respiratory failure. Most ventilators act as flow generators that assist spontaneous respiratory cycles by delivering inspiratory and expiratory pressures. This allows the patient to improve alveolar ventilation and subsequent pulmonary gas exchanges. ⋯ Phase synchronization can be identified from phase portrait and the breath-to-breath variability is well characterized by return maps. This paper is a first step in the direction of automatically estimating the comfort from measurements and not from a necessarily subjective answer given by the patient. These tools could be helpful for the physicians to set the ventilator parameters.