We believe this Phase I SBIR project was highly successful. We met and exceeded all of our primary goals. In particular, we accomplished the following major tasks:

• We designed, developed, and integrated a software and hardware environment to implement and test adaptive inverse control for ventilation. We built a skeleton ventilator, an electronic interface to the ventilator, and integrated this with an off-the-shelf microcontroller. We implemented the ventilator interface software in the microcontroller, the neural primitives required to test the AIC methods in the microcontroller, and the windows OLE component necessary to remotely control NeuroSolutions and communicate with the microcontroller. This environment can be expanded and commercialized to produce a general purpose neural control package.
• We simulated 7 different control architectures and implemented 4 different control architectures on our ventilator test setup. For the better models we also implemented a disturbance canceling mechanism that can handle the breath-to-breath differences common in patients. The ventilator test setup is the same as that used by physiologists studying spontaneous breathing. The control architectures included: standard FIR AIC, gamma memory AIC, Laguarre memory AIC (simulation only), Physiologic model AIC, predictive switching mixture of experts AIC, tap-delay neural network AIC (simulation only), and the self-organizing map based predictive switching multiple model controller (simulation only).
• We tested the different control architectures using a physiologically relevant criterion (work of breathing) and against the market-leading Puritan Bennett 7200 ventilator. Both the Physiologic AIC and Predictive Switching Mixture of Experts AIC methods outperformed the PB7200.
• We are in the process of filing a provisional patent on our physiologic AIC method, and have already filed two provisional patents on our goal of using these techniques for the higher-level goal of setting many of the ventilator settings automatically.

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