About This Wiki - The Corpus and Its Authors

Educational reference. This site explains a way of thinking about mechanical ventilation; it is not a bedside directive, and it is not a substitute for a device’s operator’s manual or for clinical judgment.

Independent, AI-generated educational project — please read first.

• Not affiliated, not endorsed. This is an independent educational synthesis. It is not affiliated with, authored by, reviewed by, or endorsed by Dr. Mireles-Cabodevila, Robert Chatburn, their co-authors, the Cleveland Clinic, or any journal or publisher. Author names, mode names, and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to attribute and describe.
• AI-generated and AI-maintained. These pages are written and kept current by an AI (a large language model) from the published literature, then checked by a human curator. They can still contain errors, omissions, or misinterpretations — verify anything that matters against the primary papers (every claim is cited).
• Educational only — not medical advice. Nothing here is a bedside directive, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for a device’s operator’s manual or for clinical judgment.
• Original content, sources cited not copied. The prose is original summary-and-explanation; the diagrams and waveforms are original — drawn or computed in-house from the public equation of motion. No copyrighted text or figures from the source papers are reproduced; the papers are cited, not copied.

What this wiki is

This is a knowledge base on mechanical-ventilator waveform interpretation and the SEVA education program (Standardized Education for Ventilatory Assistance). It is built entirely on one body of published work: the mechanical-ventilation writing of Eduardo Mireles-Cabodevila, MD and Robert L. Chatburn, RRT, together with their direct collaborators on that same work, at the Cleveland Clinic. Nothing here is sourced from outside that line of work; where a question needs evidence the two authors did not publish, this site names the gap rather than filling it (see Scope, below).

That single-author-school design is deliberate. The Mireles-Cabodevila / Chatburn corpus is unusually cumulative — one idea developed and re-stated across two decades of papers — and reading it as a single, internally consistent system is exactly the payoff. A survey the group itself ran found that even experienced ICU clinicians interpret waveforms inconsistently [Liu 2024], which is much of the reason a systematic, named approach is worth learning as a whole.

Two layers: a machine wiki and this human site

Behind this site sits a second, more granular artifact, and it helps to know the division of labor between them.

• The machine layer is a dense, one-concept-per-page wiki in the style of Karpathy’s “LLM wiki” — a persistent, interlinked set of small markdown records, each pinned to the frozen primary literature, that an assistant compiles once and keeps current rather than re-deriving on every question. It is the internal source of truth: every fact traces to a specific paper, every open question is marked, every contradiction across the corpus is logged. It is optimized for provenance and maintenance, not for a first read.

• The human layer is what you are reading now. Its chapters are comprehensive, merged reads derived from the machine layer: each one compiles many small machine-layer concepts into a single, masterable narrative. The taxonomy chapter, for instance, folds together six separate machine-layer records into one continuous explanation. The goal of a human chapter is that you can read it start to finish and hold the whole idea — the machine layer is what guarantees that read stays honest to the sources.

So the two layers are not duplicates; they are the same knowledge at two altitudes. The machine layer answers “which paper says this, and how sure are we?” The human layer answers “what is the idea, and how do the pieces fit?”

The authors and their roles

The corpus has two architects, and their contributions are distinct enough to keep separate.

Robert L. Chatburn is the originator and successive refiner of the mode-classification lineage. He wrote the origin paper proposing a standardized classification built on explicit engineering definitions [Chatburn & Primiano 2001], then the update that established the three-component, scalable mode description and named the equation of motion as its theoretical framework [Chatburn 2007], and then led the canonical statement of the system as “10 fundamental maxims” [Chatburn 2014]. He is also the author of the SEVA anchor paper, which frames the entire education program as resting “on a formal taxonomy for modes of mechanical ventilation” [Chatburn 2023 · SEVA], and, most recently, of the waveform-interpretation paper that ties the taxonomy directly to reading tracings [Chatburn 2026 · Waveforms].

Eduardo Mireles-Cabodevila supplies the rational, goal-driven framework around the classification and leads the patient-ventilator interaction (PVI) side of the work. He led the paper that introduced the biological-taxonomy analogy and the three goals of ventilation — safety, comfort, liberation — as the basis for choosing a mode [Mireles-Cabodevila 2013]; he led the flagship paper proposing a PVI nomenclature and a systematic method to read ventilator waveforms [Mireles-Cabodevila 2022]; and he led the PVI counterpart to the mode “maxims,” a separate set of ten fundamental maxims for defining and measuring interaction [Mireles-Cabodevila 2026 · PVI]. He is a co-author of the 2014 mode taxonomy and a co-developer of SEVA.

An honest caveat about the people. The frozen source artifacts list author names but not their affiliations or credentials. The “MD” and “RRT” designations, the Cleveland Clinic affiliation, and the specific units (Department of Critical Care Medicine, the Respiratory Institute, the Simulation and Advanced Skills Center, the Lerner College of Medicine) come from project context, not from the papers’ abstracts. Treat those institutional details as background, not as claims this site can cite to a source. [open]

The cumulative spine

Read in order, the corpus is a single argument that builds on itself. The human chapters follow that same arc:

1. The physics. The equation of motion for the respiratory system is the physical framework underneath everything a ventilator does [Chatburn 2007].
2. The naming. A taxonomy for modes — control variable + breath sequence + targeting scheme — is read straight off that equation [Chatburn 2014].
3. The reading. That same taxonomy becomes a systematic way to read ventilator waveforms: identify the mode, then read the patient off the waveform opposite the control variable [Mireles-Cabodevila 2022; Chatburn 2026 · Waveforms].
4. The interaction. Because a mode is a pattern of interaction between machine and patient, the framework extends naturally to patient-ventilator interaction and discordance [Mireles-Cabodevila 2026 · PVI].
5. The teaching. SEVA operationalizes all of the above into a standardized, simulation-based curriculum [Chatburn 2023 · SEVA].

Each chapter can be read on its own, but the reward compounds when they are read as one continuous idea — which is precisely what the corpus is.

Scope: deliberately single-school

This wiki covers only the Mireles-Cabodevila / Chatburn line of work. That is a feature, not an oversight. When a question genuinely needs evidence from outside that school — a competing asynchrony or mode classification, a randomized outcome trial, the primary mechanical-power / VILI literature — this site treats it as a gap to flag, not to fill. Outside sources are added only if the curator explicitly widens the scope. So if you come here expecting a neutral survey of all schools of thought on ventilation, that is not what this is: it is a deep, faithful reading of one well-developed system.

The trust model, and depth honesty

Two habits keep this site honest, and they are worth understanding as a reader.

The taxonomy is a proposed standard, not universal vocabulary. The classification the authors advocate is well-argued, is reproduced in a growing number of textbooks, and sits on physics that is genuinely settled — but manufacturers have not adopted a common language, and this is not the only accepted nomenclature [Chatburn 2007; Chatburn 2026 · Waveforms]. Throughout these chapters, claims that are settled physiology or plain definitions are treated as [established]; the advocated naming system is marked [proposed].

Sources are fetched, then human-reviewed. Every source underneath this site was gathered from the literature by an assistant and then confirmed by the human curator — a practicing domain expert — before any chapter relied on it. Nothing here is presented as settled on an unreviewed source.

Depth is labeled, and specifics are never invented. Some of the underlying papers are held only at abstract or metadata depth (several newer editorials and updates are not open-access), while the taxonomy / waveform / PVI / SEVA backbone is full text. Where a paper only asserts that a method, list, or figure exists without spelling it out, this site holds those specifics [open] and says “full text needed” rather than guessing at them. If a chapter reads as though it knows a precise step it cannot cite, that is a bug — the machine layer exists to catch exactly that.

How to use this site

Start with whichever chapter answers your immediate question; each stands alone. To learn the system as the authors built it, read in the order of the spine above — physics, then naming, then reading, then interaction, then teaching. And keep the framing in mind throughout: this is an educational reference for understanding what a ventilator is doing and why, not a set of bedside orders and not a replacement for any device’s operator’s manual.

Sources

Paper-level claims above use short author-year keys that resolve to the frozen, human-reviewed primary artifacts in the machine layer (raw/literature/, one per paper):

• [Chatburn & Primiano 2001] — Chatburn RL, Primiano FP Jr. A new system for understanding modes of mechanical ventilation. Respir Care 2001. PMID 11353550.
• [Chatburn 2007] — Chatburn RL. Classification of ventilator modes: update and proposal for implementation. Respir Care 2007. PMID 17328828.
• [Mireles-Cabodevila 2013] — Mireles-Cabodevila E, Hatipoğlu U, Chatburn RL. A rational framework for selecting modes of ventilation. Respir Care 2013. PMID 22710796.
• [Chatburn 2014] — Chatburn RL, El-Khatib M, Mireles-Cabodevila E. A taxonomy for mechanical ventilation: 10 fundamental maxims. Respir Care 2014. PMID 25118309.
• [Mireles-Cabodevila 2022] — Mireles-Cabodevila E, Siuba MT, Chatburn RL. A Taxonomy for Patient-Ventilator Interactions and a Method to Read Ventilator Waveforms. Respir Care 2022. PMID 34470804.
• [Chatburn 2023 · SEVA] — Chatburn RL. The complexities of mechanical ventilation: toppling the Tower of Babel (SEVA program). Respir Care 2023. PMID 37225651.
• [Liu 2024] — Liu PH, et al. Survey of ventilator waveform interpretation among ICU professionals. Respir Care 2024. PMID 38653558.
• [Chatburn 2026 · Waveforms] — Chatburn RL. How to interpret ventilator waveforms using the taxonomy for modes of mechanical ventilation. 2026. PMID 41631602.
• [Mireles-Cabodevila 2026 · PVI] — Mireles-Cabodevila E, Vaporidi K, Blanch L, Chatburn RL. Defining and Measuring Patient-Ventilator Interactions: 10 Fundamental Maxims. 2026. PMID 41913371.

This chapter is a human-layer synthesis of the machine-layer records that describe the corpus and its authors (see the derived_from field) and the Lit — … source summaries they cite. Institutional affiliations and credentials are drawn from project context, not from the frozen abstracts, and are held [open].