Individuality of breathing patterns in patients under noninvasive mechanical ventilation evidenced by chaotic global models.

Autonomous global models based on radial basis functions were obtained from data measured from patients under noninvasive mechanical ventilation. Some of these models, which are discussed in the paper, turn out to have chaotic or quasi-periodic solutions, thus providing a first piece of evidence that the underlying dynamics of the data used to estimate the global models are likely to be chaotic or, at least, have a chaotic component. It is explicitly shown that one of such global models produces attractors characterized by a Horseshoe map, two models produce toroidal chaos, and one model produces a quasi-periodic regime. These topologically inequivalent attractors evidence the individuality of breathing profiles observed in patient under noninvasive ventilation. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4794435]