J Med Syst
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The integration of computer systems into clinical practice is a consequence of the growing sophistication of medical machinery. The fact that patient management in large institutions is handled by complex information systems brings about the need for integration between applications on both sides. The paper describes a prototype for automatic data collection from intensive care devices developed at Pedro Hispano Hospital in Portugal. ⋯ Automatic acquisition eliminates transcription errors, improves the quality of records and allows the assembly of large electronic archives of vital sign data. The concern with data archiving in standard formats opens many possibilities for further analysis of the collected data sets. The possibility of communicating via the HL7 standard makes the whole system easily interoperable with applications in related domains.
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A discreet event simulation methodology has been used to establish a quantitative relationship between Emergency Department (ED) performance characteristics, such as percent of time on ambulance diversion and the number of patients in queue in the waiting room, and the upper limits of patient length of stay (LOS). A simulation process model of ED patient flow has been developed that took into account a significant difference between LOS distributions of patients discharged home and patients admitted into the hospital. Using simulation model it has been identified that ED diversion could be negligible (less than approximately 0.5%) if patients discharged home stay in ED not more than 5 h, and patients admitted into the hospital stay in ED not more than 6 h Using full factorial design of experiments with two factors and the model's predicted percent diversion as a response function, other combinations of LOS upper limits have been determined that would result in low ED percent diversion as well. It has also been determined that if the number of patients exceeds 11 in queue in ED waiting room then the diversion percent is rapidly increasing.
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In this study, Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and autoregressive (AR) methods were selected for processing the photoplethysmogram (PPG), electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded in order to examine the effects of pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) at extremely low frequency (ELF) upon the human electrophysiological signal behavior. The parameters in the autoregressive (AR) method were found by using the least squares method. ⋯ These power spectra were then used to compare the applied methods in terms of their frequency resolution and the effects in extraction of the features representing the PPG, ECG, and EEG signals. Some conclusions were drawn concerning the efficiency of the FFT and least squares AR methods as feature extraction methods used for representing the signals under study.
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Long waiting times for emergency operations increase a patient's risk of postoperative complications and morbidity. Reserving Operating Room (OR) capacity is a common technique to maximize the responsiveness of an OR in case of arrival of an emergency patient. This study determines the best way to reserve OR time for emergency surgery. ⋯ Working in overtime was reduced by 20%, and overall OR utilisation can increase by around 3%. Emergency patients are operated upon more efficiently on elective Operating Rooms instead of a dedicated Emergency OR. The results of this study led to closing of the Emergency OR in the Erasmus MC (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).
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In this study, a fuzzy logic-based anesthetic depth decision support system (ADDSS) was realized for anesthetic depth control to help anesthetists in surgeries. Depth of anesthesia for a patient can change according to anesthetic agent and characteristic properties of a patient such as age, weight, etc. During the surgery, depth of anesthesia of a patient is determined by the experience of anesthetist controlling of systolic arterial pressure (SAP) and heart pulse rate (HPR) parameters. ⋯ By the help of this system, precise anesthetic depth could have provided. Thus, the anesthetist will spend less time to provide anesthetic and the patient will have a safer and less expensive operation. This study was performed under sevoflurane anesthetic.