Surveillance Camera-based Cardio-respiratory Monitoring for Critical Patients in ICU

Camera-based vital signs monitoring has been extensively researched in non-medical fields in recent years. Intensive Care Unit (ICU) typically requires continuous monitoring of patients' physiology for alarming the emergency such as patient deterioration or delirium. In this paper, we propose to use the surveillance closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras installed in ICU for cardio-respiratory monitoring of critically-ill patients, thus created a first clinical video dataset (including 10 deteriorated patients) in ICU using CCTV cameras. Along with the dataset, a video processing framework with the latest core algorithms designed for pulse and respiratory signal extraction has been demonstrated. A joint Region-of-Interest optimization approach using pulsatile living-skin maps and respiratory maps was proposed to improve the vital signs monitoring for ICU patients. A motion intensity based quality metric was designed to reject measurement outliers induced by patient motion or nurse operation. Based on the valid measurements selected by the metric, the overall Mean Absolute Error for heart rate is 1.7 bpm, and for breathing rate is 1.6 bpm. Preliminary clinical validations show that robust cardio-respiratory monitoring is indeed feasible for CCTV cameras in ICU, and such a warding solution can be quickly integrated into current hospital information systems for large-scale deployment, by leveraging the existing hardware and infrastructures of the Internet of Medical Things.