This award will support collaborative research in intelligent instrumentation between Dr. Janos Sztipanovits and Dr. Benoit Dawant, Center for Intelligent Systems, Vanderbilt University, and Dr. E. R. Carson, Center for Measurement and Information in Medicine, City University, London, England. The objective of this collaboration is to provide opportunities for the researchers at both institutions to combine their ideas and experience to advance the state-of-the-art in intelligent instrumentation in general, and more specifically, to develop a new generation of patient monitoring systems to be used in critical care medicine. One of the main research targets in the Vanderbilt University Department of Electrical Engineering has been the development of generic intelligent real-time and artificial intelligence techniques to improve the flexibility of the instruments. The City University has a long research history in the area of medical instrumentation, and is interested in applying new technologies to the problem of critical care monitoring. This collaborative effort will combine the complementary expertise of the two groups. Multigraph Architecture will provide the framework for the overall design and implementation of this project. The main aspects of the proposed collaboration will be the transfer of the technology developed at Vanderbilt University, the capture and the representa- tion in terms of knowledge-bases of the medical expertise available at City University, and the implementation and evaluation of a system prototype. The initial transfer of technology will be done by means of scientific reports, selected publications, and exchange of software. City University will then serve as an experimental background for testing the proposed approach. Results of this test will be reported to Vanderbilt University and serve as a driving force for modifications and improvement to the overall architecture.
