Quantifying the Severity of Acute Lung Injury Using Dead-Space Ventilation: Should the Lung Injury Score Be Updated?

During the past decade of research on acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) there has been heightened interest in measuring physiologic dead-space fraction (VD/VT). Since ARDS first was described 44 years ago, the primary focus on gas exchange abnormalities concerned