مراقبة المرضى - الخدمات الطبية .. الحاسبات تعمل

Patient Monitoring - Medical Services .. Computers work

Patient Monitoring

Modern surgery requires monitoring a number of physiological indicators of the patient during and after major surgical operations. In the past, intensive care centers relied on specially trained nurses to measure each patient's temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and breathing. Today, a small computer is used to monitor these physiological indicators and alert when the measurements exceed certain limits. The important indicators that the computer usually handles are blood pressure, pulse rate, electrocardiogram, respiratory rate, inhaled air volume, and electroencephalogram.

These signals are weak, so they are amplified or entered into a processor that feeds the computer with each of them in succession for a specific period of time. In this field, a computer with a memory capacity of about 12,000 words is used and executes about 700,000 instructions per second.

(Intensive care system: Respiratory device (A), inhaled air volume (B), electroencephalogram (C), blood pressure (D), respiratory rate (E), pulse rate (F), electrocardiogram (G)

(Console control of the system that monitors the body's physiological indicators to the top). Analysis of electroencephalograms (to the left) .

The primary significance of some of these signals may be in their intensity, as in pulse rate or blood pressure, or it may be in the form of the signal, as is the case with the electrocardiogram, as this form indicates the functional state of the heart, so the computer must then detect the change in the form of the chart and not just measure the amounts of the signals.

The cycle of the heart's electrical signals takes about eight-tenths of a second. The computer may take a sample of this signal once every 44 milliseconds, i.e. at a rate of approximately 23 samples per second, then these samples are converted into digital signals, so the computer obtains a set of digital signals that are very close to the form of the original electrical signal. The computer compares each of these samples with an upper and lower limit for each of them, so if some radioactive isotopes accumulate in malignant tumors more than in tissues, their radiation intensity is measured by a camera that works with healthy radiation. Atomic and emits electrical signals that the isotopic computer analyzes and then converts them into digital signals to display and save them.

If a sample exceeds either of these limits, the computer issues an audible alert and prints an abnormal condition. It is noted that the computer finds enough time, between one sample and another, to execute a relatively small program such as comparing the sample to the two limits concerned. The computer can execute approximately 30,800 instructions, i.e. 700,000 × 0.044, in the period between the two samples of the electrocardiogram. If the computer also takes samples from five other channels during this period, it will have enough time to execute approximately 6160 instructions, i.e. 30,800:05