Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Critically ill patients in the intensive care unit face life-threatening health conditions and thus, are continuously and closely monitored to enable prompt intervention in case of any sudden worsening of their condition. Monitoring involves acquiring and archiving a large number of signals and data over extended time intervals. Monitoring data includes vital signs, blood gas concentrations, ventilation parameters and various laboratory results, and physicians' notes. ******Monitoring also includes subjective visual assessments, performed by physicians, of several aspects of a patient's health. When visual assessment data is gathered there typically are no, less subjective, alternatives available to record patient state. Visual assessment includes: 1- the general motility of the patient; 2- the level of consciousness, determined through the evaluation of the patient's eyes movements; 3- any neurological deficit, done by evaluating the decrease in motility of one part of the body such as the leg, arm, or face; 4- the parameters of spontaneous non-mechanically ventilated respiration such as the frequency and the maximum inspired volume; 5- the movement induced by respiration such as the movement of the chest, abdomen, and other secondary muscles to detect and evaluate retractions; 6- and all skin aspects and color such as cyanosis, purpura, erythema, cutaneous necrosis, and burns. Visual monitoring, although widely employed, is nonetheless subjective and qualitative in nature. ******Physicians also evaluate the peripheral hypo-vascularization by touching and pressing a patient's extremities in order to assess their relative temperature. In fact, the heat distribution across a patient's body surface gives information about changes to the vascularization inside the body. More specifically, cold extremities (hands for instance) indicate the existence of a vascularization centralization which corresponds to a hyper-vascularization of the deep organs heart, brain and kidneys to the detriment of the superficial ones. Peripheral hypo-vascularization happens in situations of severe hemodynamic stress such as heart failures, severe infections, and massive bleedings. This evaluation is both subjective and qualitative, and is only possible when the physician is present at the patient's bedside.******Our objective is to support the decisions made by physicians providing care to critically ill patients. We aim to use computer vision and artificial intelligence to help in the assessment of patients' distress in the intensive care unit. More specifically, we intend to focus on assessing patient's breathing distress, agitation, consciousness level, and skin temperature distribution using new developments in video acquisition and machine learning.******Our research program will improve the care provided to critically ill patients, including those who are in remote regions, by providing continuous, and quantitative monitoring of their health distress situations. *****