An Integrated Decision Support Platform for Medical Specialists K. DIMOPOULOS, G. MANDELLOS, G. KOUTELAKIS, G. TRIANTAFYLLOU, M. KOUKIAS, D. LYMPEROPOULOS Wire Communication Lab, Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept., University of Patras, Rion GREECE Abstract: - This paper presents an integrated decision support platform for medical specialists, which use the signals from different points of the human body as a part of the patient examination. This platform is a software application for the acquisition, archiving, presenting and processing of medical signals. Moreover, this application preserves data that concern patient’s history and past medical treatment. The coexistence of medical signals and patient history data in a functional interface supports doctors to result in the potentially more accurate diagnosis and treatment for each incident. Application’s architecture provides the user with an integrated electronic working domain handling diverse types of information and medical records. The design and the implementation of the platform was a result of a close collaboration between engineers and doctors in order the development of a real efficient tool for the medical specialists to be achieved. Key-Words: - Electroencephalography, EEG, ECG, Video-EEG, Functional-MRI, WADA-Test, SPECT, Spectroscopy, Vital Signs, Electrocardiography 1 Introduction The pre-surgical assessment of epileptic patients involves a wide range of tests (EEG, Video EEG – ictal, interictal, PET, brain activity recording with implanted electrodes, anatomic and functional MRI, MEG, WADA test) that are employed for the functional evaluation of epilepsy cases and the exact anatomical localization of the focal point. The recording and the representation of these signals can be significant, since it could be a powerful tool to support and justify the decision of neurologists. Vital Signs consist another major component of patient care. Evaluating a patient’s breathing, acquiring the electrocardiogram, assessing the heart rate, taking his temperature, determining the blood pressure, and obtaining a medical history represent a basic set of actions, which lead to useful medical data. This information is obtained from every patient a medical doctor encounter. In emergency cases (e.g. ambulance transportation[1]), acquisition of the above vital signs is the first care service offered to the patient. Without this information, the doctor may remain unaware of life threatening conditions that require him to provide specific treatment at the scene along with prompt transport to the appropriate treatment facility. A complete clinical picture of a patient requests specially designed dynamic applications for storing, analysing, and correlating a range of non- homogeneous data providing the medical specialists the capability of making a decision about the pharmacological and/or operational treatment they will follow. This paper presents an integrated decision support platform, which provides the facility of managing Encephalography, Cardiography and other medical signals that help doctors to make a more accurate diagnosis and treatment of the incidents, they should manage. The platform, described in this paper, is software for archiving, presenting and processing of signals, which are very important for the human health. The development of the application took place in cooperation with the medical stuff of the Cardiology Department of the Olympion Hospital, in Patras, and the Neurosurgery Clinic of Evangelismos General Hospital, in Athens, Greece. The platform provides an integrated environment for medical signals management that presents in a functional way one or more kind of different signals on doctor’s demand. Moreover, this environment keeps and provides all the information of the past patient state that is useful for the full utilization of the signals’ data. The acquisition of a large quantity of information offers to the system the ability to operate as an expert system, too. Thus, it has the capability to execute procedures that extract suggestions for the doctors in order to treat medical incidents in a more accurate and effective way. Proceedings of the 5th WSEAS Int. Conf. on APPLIED INFORMATICS and COMMUNICATIONS, Malta, September 15-17, 2005 (pp27-32)