A parallel software architecture for building intelligent medical monitors.

Intensive care units become more complicated each day as the number of devices developed to monitor various aspects of a patient's status continues to increase. Intelligent monitors attempt to reduce this complexity by interpreting the data and presenting a high level summary to the clinician. We propose an innovative parallel software architecture for constructing intelligent medical monitors: the process trellis. The process trellis is an explicitly parallel structure, and therefore can take advantage of the performance gains available from parallel computing hardware. It does not, however, presuppose any expertise in parallel programming on the part of the application programmer. A prototype cardiovascular monitor has been built using this parallel software architecture. Preliminary testing of the monitor has shown that real-time cardiovascular monitoring, including data calculations, symbolic classification, and interpretation can be accomplished in real-time.