Article Preview
Top2. The Alarm System
The goal of the data analysis was the development of a prediction system for the individual mortality prognosis. Such systems can be used in the emergency case or for advances in treatment by automatic state monitoring. In our case, the analysis goal was two-fold: first, we liked to trace back the causes and influences of several clinical variables like coagulation or thrombocyte level to the patient outcome, and second, we aimed to build an alarm system which rings an alarm as soon as a bad state is reached. In this contribution, we focus on the latter case.
The main problem for a medical alarm system is the availability of data. Unfortunately, there is no clinical standard for bedside monitoring or patient data bases in Germany. For this reason, for our analysis of septic shock (which is a rare event) we had to initiate a multi-center study and concentrated on those 140 variables only, which are currently available in clinical routine. All gene tests or other special features were practically out of reach.
The next problem after obtaining the data is the question: What kind of analysis system should we use? It is well known that most metabolic processes are non-linear. Therefore, the usage of all linear methods like correlation analysis is not adequate. Instead, we used the method of formal neural networks.