Weanpro: a weaning protocol expert system

Author

Tong, D.A. ; Golden, E.B. ; Napper, S.A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Biomed. Eng., Louisiana Tech. Univ., Ruston, LA, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

9-12 Nov 1989

Firstpage

1857

Abstract

A description is given of WEANPRO, an expert system that assists respiratory therapists and nurses in weaning postoperative cardiovascular surgery patients from mechanical ventilation in the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU). WEANPRO suggests ventilator settings that lead the patient toward independent breathing on the basis of arterial blood gas (ABG) analysis, spontaneous effort, and hemodynamics. WEANPRO was developed using M.1, an expert system shell, and runs on any 80286- or 80386-based personal computer. The expert system was developed to increase the quality and decrease the cost of the weaning process that occurs every day in the CVICU. An evaluation revealed that WEANPRO decreased the mean number of ABG analyses necessary to wean patients from 6.2 to 3.5. A one-tailed test of hypothesis revealed that WEANPRO´s mean is statistically less than the clinicians mean with a t-statistic of -4.994 and a p-value of 2.3772E-6

Keywords

cardiology; expert systems; medical computing; surgery; 1-tailed test; WEANPRO; arterial blood gas analysis; cardiovascular intensive care unit; hemodynamics; mechanical ventilation; p-value; personal computer; postoperative cardiovascular surgery patients; respiratory therapists; spontaneous effort; t-statistic; ventilator settings; weaning protocol expert system; Blood; Cardiology; Costs; Expert systems; Hemodynamics; Microcomputers; Protocols; Surgery; Testing; Ventilation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 1989. Images of the Twenty-First Century., Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IEMBS.1989.96491

Filename

96491