Real-time processing and visualization of intensive care unit data

Abstract

Intensive care unit (ICU) patients undergo detailed monitoring so that copious information regarding their condition is available to support clinical decision-making. Full utilization of the data depends heavily on its quantity, quality and manner of presentation to the physician at the bedside of a patient. In this thesis, we implemented a visualization system to aid ICU clinicians in collecting, processing, and displaying available ICU data. Our goals for the system are: to be able to receive large quantities of patient data from various sources, to compute complex functions over the data that are able to quantify an ICU patient's condition, to plot the data using a clean and interactive interface, and to be capable of live plot updates upon receiving new data. We made significant headway toward our goals, and we succeeded in creating a highly adaptable visualization system that future developers and users will be able to customize.