Physiological object displays

#This invention relates to display systems for displaying complex medical information to a physician. More specifically, the invention relates to hardware, software and object displays for displaying complex physiological information to physicians in unique graphical display formats in real time.

#Medical display systems provide information to physicians in a clinical setting. Typical display systems provide data in the form of numbers and one-dimensional signal waveforms that must be assessed, in real time, by the attending physician. Alanns are sometimes included with such systems to warn the physician of an unsafe condition, e.g., a number exceeds a recommended value. In the field of anesthesiology, for example, the anesthesiologist must monitor the patient's condition and at the same time (i) recognize problems, (ii) identify the cause of the problems, and (iii) take corrective action during the administration of the anesthesia. An error in judgment can be fatal.

#Physiologic data displays of the patient's condition play a central role in allowing surgeons and anesthesiologists to observe problem states in their patients and deduce the most likely causes of the problem state during surgery, thus allowing expeditious treatment. As one might predict, 63 percent of the reported incidents in the Australian Incident Monitoring Study (AIMS) database were considered detectable with standard data monitors and potentially avoidable. Others have attempted to address these problems, but with only limited success.

#FIG. 1 shows an overview of the oxygen cycle;

#FIG. 2 shows one embodiment of the extended heart object;

#FIG. 3 is a flowchart illustrating one method that may be used to update the extended heart object;

#I. Hardware System

#FIG. 17 illustrates a system 310 constructed according to an embodiment of the invention. A series of probes 312 are connected to various monitoring activities associated with the patient 314, e.g., a heart rate probe 12a. These probes are well known and typically generate analog signals 316 representative of the monitored activity. The signals 316 are converted through well-known A/D devices 318 in a data conversion module 320 to generate digital data corresponding to the analog signals 16. This data is made available on a data bus 322.

#A processing module 324 processes data on the bus 322 to generate usable quantitative measures of patient activity as well as to compare and create object displays that, for example: (1) relate certain data relative to other data; (2) present data in context; (3) relate data to a frame of reference; (4) determine the rate of change information in the data; and/or (5) to present event information.