Medical engineering & physics
-
Endotracheal intubation is a complex medical procedure in which a ventilating tube is inserted into the human trachea. Improper positioning carries potentially fatal consequences and therefore confirmation of correct positioning is mandatory. This paper introduces a novel system for endotracheal tube position confirmation. ⋯ The results, obtained using a leave-one-case-out method, show that the system correctly classified 1530 out of 1600 (95.6%) of the cow intubations images, and 351 out of the 358 human images (98.0%). Misclassification of an image of the esophagus as carina or upper-trachea, which is potentially fatal, was extremely rare (only one case when in the animal dataset and no cases when in the human intubation dataset). The classification results of the cow intubations dataset compare favorably with a state-of-the-art classification method tested on the same dataset.