A new representation of acid-base disturbances

Abstract

The acid-base status of intensive care patients is monitored on the basis of three quantities. The graphical representation which may be of help for the monitoring task is therefore cumbersome. The classical Siggaard-Andersen acid-base chart is such a representation, but it is only suited for evaluating one acid-base status at a time and not for representing acid-base paths. A new representation, obtained after a principal components transformation is presented. It is shown that the representation is characteristic for the laboratory instrument used. Its most attractive feature is that it is distortionless with respect to the three-dimensional configuration.

Medical Informatics, Art or Science?

“…Although the clinical laboratory is one of the places where automation is most advanced, the checking of the quality and validity of laboratory data remains an object of scientific research. To that end, integration between laboratory systems and knowledge processing systems is a commendable effort (e. g., [28] and example 15 given below). The labor-160 atory data' are checked for validity by the system before being reported to the clinical department.…”