Page 15 - JSOM Spring 2025

FIGURE 3 Inserted supraglottic airway device, seen from the
perspective of a participant wearing night vision goggles. light conditions. This resulted in a total of 318 tests.
FIGURE 4 Illustration of the study design.
FIGURE 5 Lucie night vision goggles used in this study.
Each participant (n=53) had to place each SAD under both
SAD placement success, which was determined to be the deliv-
ery of a 500-mL tidal volume with a bag valve to the manikin,
was the primary target variable. The delivered tidal volume
was checked by a study team member and displayed on the
manikin. Placement time, which was measured from first
picking up the device until successful ventilation, and usage
problems (mentioned by the participant or recognized by a
study team member) were secondary target variables and doc-
umented within the standardized study form.
The NVG used were the Lucie image intensifier goggles (Thales
Angenieux, Saint-Héand, France), which is a third- generation
binocular NVG standard within the German military (Figure 5).
The statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS Version
24 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY). The primary hypothesis was
whether there was a difference in the time of placement be-
tween ambient light and using NVG in darkness for each of
the three SADs, adjusted for the experience of the participants.
Pairwise differences of log-transformed times (to restore nor-
mality and meet the assumptions of analysis of covariance)
were submitted to analysis of variance with experience as a
covariate to compare ambient light against NVG and to com-
pare SADs under both visual conditions.
Results
The study included 53 participants. 96% of the participants
were male. All participants were between 18 and 44 years of
age (median 27 yr).
This nearly represents current proportion and demographic
structure of infantry units within the German military.
As shown in Table 1, the different SADs were successfully placed
on the first try in more than 90% of cases, both in ambient light
and using NVG. There were no distinct differences between the
successful SAD placement rates under the two conditions.
Placement times for the different SADs, however, were signifi-
cantly affected by ambient conditions, and there were distinct
differences between the SAD designs.
Use of SAD with NVG | 13