Grant: Operating Grant

In health care, use of technology often mirrors that of the rest of society. In the past decade we have seen a steady rise in the use of computers in many areas of health care. Computers are very good for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data.In an operating room, there are many monitors that collect and display information about the function of the patient's body. This is essential to let the doctors and nurses know what is going on with the patient. But it is difficult for the doctors to do their work and watch both the patient and the monitors at the same time. It is possible to miss something important, like a change in the patient's breathing. In our research, we develop new ways for computers to improve the way doctors and nurses work and to make health care safer for patients. We are working to develop a computer that has built-in knowledge to help doctors and nurses recognize potentially dangerous situations. This type of computer is called an expert system. Over the last 7 years we have worked on our goal to develop the Intelligent Anesthesia Navigator (IAN). We have trained the computer to automatically detect important changes in the patient. These changes are combined in a set of rules that are stored in the computer. The computer continuously checks to see if rules have been broken. If a rule is broken, the computer provides advice that helps the doctors to make critical decisions about actions that need to be taken. The rules were developed with the help of expert anesthesiologists. IAN has several related projects. In this study, we are testing the expert system called eVENT. eVENT provides expert advice about the patient's breathing. We have developed and tested a prototype of eVENT and now want to test how it works in practice. To do this we plan to use computer based simulations and test it when used by anesthesiologists in a full size human simulator. If these tests are successful we will then be ready to evaluate eVENT on real patients.