Dynamic composition of medical support services in the ICU: Platform and algorithm design details

Abstract

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is an extremely data-intensive environment where each patient needs to be monitored 24/7. Bedside monitors continuously register vital patient values (such as serum creatinine, systolic blood pressure) which are recorded frequently in the hospital database (e.g. every 2 min in the ICU of the Ghent University Hospital), laboratories generate hundreds of results of blood and urine samples, and nurses measure blood pressure and temperature up to 4 times an hour. The processing of such large amount of data requires an automated system to support the physicians' daily work. The Intensive Care Service Platform (ICSP) offers the needed support through the development of medical support services for processing and monitoring patients' data. With an increased deployment of these medical support services, reusing existing services as building blocks to create new services offers flexibility to the developer and accelerates the design process. This paper presents a new addition to the ICSP, the Dynamic Composer for Web services. Based on a semantic description of the medical support services, this Composer enables a service to be executed by creating a composition of medical services that provide the needed calculations. The composition is achieved using various algorithms satisfying certain quality of service (QoS) constraints and requirements. In addition to the automatic composition the paper also proposes a recovery mechanism in case of unavailable services. When executing the composition of medical services, unavailable services are dynamically replaced by equivalent services or a new composition achieving the same result. The presented platform and QoS algorithms are put through extensive performance and scalability tests for typical ICU scenarios, in which basic medical services are composed to a complex patient monitoring service.