A review of the current status and progress in difficult airway assessment research

Abstract

A difficult airway is a situation in which an anesthesiologist with more than 5 years of experience encounters difficulty with intubation or mask ventilation. According to the 2022 American Society of Anesthesiologists Practice Guidelines for the Management of Difficult Airway, difficult airways are subdivided into seven detailed categories. This condition can lead to serious adverse events and therefore must be diagnosed accurately and quickly. In this review, we comprehensively summarize and discuss the different methods used in clinical practice and research to assess difficult airways, including medical history, simple bedside assessment, comprehensive assessment of indicators, preoperative endoscopic airway examination, imaging, computer-assisted airway reconstruction, and 3D-printing techniques. We also discuss in detail the latest trends in difficult airway assessment through mathematical methods and artificial intelligence. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence and other technologies, in the near future, we will be able to predict whether a patient has a difficult airway simply by taking an image of the patient's face through a cell phone program. Artificial intelligence and other technologies will bring great changes to the development of airway assessment, and at the same time raise some new questions that we should think about.