14 Oct 2010
Patients with chest pains who enter a hospital emergency room typically have their vital signs taken and are asked about their medical history and the symptoms they are experiencing.
One limitation to doing this is that people have different pain thresholds, so a stoic person may say he has only mild pain when he is really just a heartbeat away from a cardiac arrest.
Also, traditional vital signs such as pulse rate and blood pressure cannot accurately predict how critical the patient’s condition is.
With the current mode of medical assessment quite subjective and fraught with limitations, researchers from the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed a computer program that gives an objective measure of a patient’s risk of going into cardiac arrest.
They are working with a commercial partner to incorporate this software into a portable machine to which a patient can be hooked up, so electric signals can be picked up. From these signals, the patient’s heart rate variability – the time interval between heartbeats – can be calculated, and the risk of cardiac arrest objectively measured.
This data enables emergency room staff to decide which patient is seen to sooner, said Associate Professor Marcus Ong, consultant and director of research, and senior medical scientist in SGH’s Department of Emergency Medicine. He worked with Associate Professor Lin Zhi Ping of NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
“The decision of who gets first priority or a lower priority – this is where the invention is targeted,” said Prof Ong.
SGH’s emergency room handles 300 to 500 patients a day, almost half with critical conditions such as heart attack, stroke and major trauma.
The professors will present their findings at a scientific congress this weekend.
Click for jpg format
« Back to previous
page
back to top