From the classroom to the emergency room, O.R. and beyond. You're joining Trauma ICU Rounds with your host, Dr. Dennis Kim.

I'd like to welcome you back to trauma ICU rounds. I'm your host, Dr. Dennis Kim. I'm an associate professor of clinical surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,

and a trauma surgeon and the medical director of the trauma surgical ICU at Harbor, UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California.

This week, we welcomed our new class of interns here at Harbor, UCLA,

and for all of you who are starting out your residency training, welcome.

I can still vividly remember the visceral mixed emotions of excitement, enthusiasm,

anxiety, and insecurity of starting my surgical residency and thinking that it would be a

lifetime before fellowship or my early career as an attending surgeon would begin.

And almost 20 years later, it's really incredible to think about how quickly time just

kind of flew by.

With that said, in thinking about a topic for today's rounds, particularly for those of you

who are starting your postgraduate training in the ICU, a not at all intimidating

rotation, I thought that it would be timely to review how we assess patients for readiness for

extubation or the approach to liberating our patients from the ventilator. As the main goal of

mechanical ventilation is to ultimately not need mechanical ventilation, you can pretty much be

assured that you will be asked daily whether or not your vented patient should be

extubated and why or why not.

So we have four key objectives for today's podcast and by the end of rounds you should

be able to, number one, understand the basic approach

to assessing ventilated patients for readiness for extubation.

Number two, describe commonly used weaning parameters that may potentially, but not really,

assist us in determining the likelihood of success or failure during a spontaneous breathing trial

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