Echo: A large display interactive visualization of ICU data for effective care handoffs

Abstract

One of the significant challenges of care transitions in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) is the lack of effective support tools for outgoing clinicians to find, filter, organize, and annotate information that can be effectively handed off to the incoming team. We present a large display interactive multivariate visual approach, aimed towards supporting clinicians during the transition of care. We first provide a characterization of the problem domain in terms of data and tasks, based on an observation session at the University of Illinois Hospital, and on interviews with several biomedical researchers and ICU clinicians. Informed by this experience, we design a scalable, interactive visual approach that supports both overview and detail views of ICU patient data, as well as anomaly detection, comparison, and annotation of the data. We demonstrate a large-display implementation of the visualization on an existing anonymized ICU dataset. Feedback from domain experts indicates this approach successfully meets the requirements of effective care transitions.

Activity-Centered Domain Characterization for Problem-Driven Scientific Visualization

“…Each visualization project required collaboration with domain experts from a variety of domains, from orthopedics to turbulent combustion (e.g. [1, 18, 30, 33, 34, 51, 61]), and was, in its first iteration, completed in under 3 months. For each of these projects (several of which have resulted in publications), this work considers success in terms of both novelty (defined as potential for publication) and, along Brooks’s criteria [8], the domain experts’ expressed interest in adopting the research result as a tool.…”

“…Such requirements go beyond usability and user experience goals: 1) Scalability influences more than just visual scalability (would we be able to store and process on the fly a petascale dataset? [28, 33]); 2) Privacy can affect the publication of a project—several interdisciplinary projects nearly-failed publication because data was revealed to be private, sensitive, or proprietary [23, 51]; 3) Certain scientific user groups have a strong preference for desktop applications (as opposed to web-based) [58], and other groups expect cross-platform compatibility [46]. All the factors above influence the design and outcome of a project.…”

Visualizing the recovery of patients in Critical Care Units

“…The second research-based development is the ECHO system was developed by Thomas et al 24 The emphasis of this software is on large screen displays used to increase the effective and efficient handover of patients as staff change shifts. The visual representation of the data is both concise and clear.…”

Visual Analysis and Detection of Contrails in Aircraft Engine Simulations

“…Additionally, Kiviat diagrams display details about each member's contrail attributes (e.g., mean temperature, total area, total length, total mass, and total particles). Due to their closed polygon shape, a preattentive feature, Kiviats are particularly effective in small multiple form [54,87], emphasizing similar ensemble members or outliers. Hovering over the Kiviat shows related information about the contrail characteristics of a particular member.…”