Developing a Bedside Software for Digitizing Paper Based Medical Data in Intensive Care Settings

Abstract

Objective: Most of the data in medical monitoring are gathered analogically or their digital format is inaccessible to the clinician. Current techniques of digitization are very complicated and mostly cause heavy costs. We have developed a software package which can convert paper based input data to a digital format.Design: Recordings were obtained from patients with supratentorial tumors who were monitored postoperatively after elective craniotomy. Then the clinically determined values were calculated by our software and were compared with the average value for each point as measured by three independent blinded examiners. Results: Recordings were obtained from 10 patients. The resultant curve for each tested parameter was completely compatible with the related curve obtained by our digitization software. In addition statistical analysis showed no difference between the results in clinical assays and the digitized results.Conclusion: Our proposed software is tested by several different measurements and compared with the clinical results. Our proposed software is based on a brief program which is not only precise but also simple and user friendly and cheap. It eliminates the background grid and artifacts especially in TCD monitoring record which causes a very crowded display.