Computer methods and programs in biomedicine
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Sep 2011
Using "off-the-shelf" tools for terabyte-scale waveform recording in intensive care: computer system design, database description and lessons learned.
Until now, the creation of massive (long-term and multichannel) waveform databases in intensive care required an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, engineers and informaticians and, in most cases, also design-specific software and hardware development. Recently, several commercial software tools for waveform acquisition became available. Although commercial products and even turnkey systems are now being marketed as simple and effective, the performance of those solutions is not known. ⋯ Up to six ECG leads, all other monitored waveforms, and all monitored numeric data were recorded in most of the cases. We describe the details of building blocks of our system, provide description of three datasets exported from our VSDB and compare the contents of our VSDB with other available waveform databases. Finally, we summarize lessons learned during recording, storage, and pre-processing of physiologic signals.