Towards the implementation of intelligent structures in intensive care monitoring: the advantages of the symbolic pre-processing

V ic e n te M o rc t-B o n lllo , A m p a ro A lo n soB c ta n z o s, J o h n R. S c a rle A b s tr a c t Intensive care of patients requires the management of a large quantity of Information which must be Interpreted differently for each specific case. Until now. efforts to improve the quality of monitoring systems have followed two different approaches a)nuildlng sophisticated acquisition and storage equipment allowing friendly presentation of the results, and b) Building expert systems. In tills paper we propose an alternative approach that combines deterministic and heuristic techniques. The core of the approach consists of performing the symbolic processing of the numerical data before running the inferential structure of the overall system. I n tr o d u c t io n In th e ICU e n v ir o n m e n t th e h e te ro g e n e ity o f th e p a t ie n t s is th e d o m i n a n t p a tte r n , a n d th e c r ite r ia for in t e r p r e ta tio n o f th e re s p e c tiv e m o n ito r e d p a r a m e ­ te r s v a ry d e p e n d in g o n th e o rig in a l c a u s e s t h a t m o ti­ v a te d th e ir a d m is s io n in th e U n it. C e r ta in c h a r a c t e r i s ­ tic s I n h e r e n t to e a c h p a t ie n t m a y m o d ify th e c r ite r ia for th e in t e r p r e ta t io n o f th e c o r r e s p o n d in g m e a s u r e m e n ts [1]. B u ild in g …