Patent ID: 7329226

Claim:
A system for assessing pulmonary performance through transthoracic impedance monitoring, comprising: an implantable medical device to directly collect transthoracic impedance measures; a correlation component to correlate the transthoracic impedance measures to pulmonary functional measures relative to performance of at least one respiration cycle and to group the transthoracic impedance measures into at least one measures set corresponding to one of an inspiratory phase and an expiratory phase; and an analysis component to evaluate the pulmonary functional measures which were determined from the at least one transthoracic impedance measures set to identify a respiratory pattern relative to the inspiratory phase or the expiratory phase to represent pulmonary performance, comprising: a trending subcomponent to evaluate a trend in changes in the respiratory pattern relative to at least one previous respiratory pattern; a monitoring subcomponent to monitor the trend and the changes; and an alert subcomponent to compare the trends to thresholds and to generate an alert upon sufficient deviation from the thresholds.