Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Chest Radiographs in Intensive Care.

The chest radiograph is an essential tool for the diagnosis of several lung diseases in intensive care units (ICU). However, several factors make the interpretation of the chest radiograph difficult including the number of X-rays done daily in ICU, the quality of the chest radiograph, and the lack of a standardized interpretation. To overcome these limitations in the interpretation of chest radiographs, researchers have developed computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this review, the authors report the methodology used to develop CAD systems including identification of the region of interest, analysis of these regions, and classification. Currently, only a few CAD systems for chest X-ray interpretation are commercially available. Some promising research is ongoing, but the involvement of the pediatric research community is needed for the development and validation of such CAD systems dedicated to pediatric intensive care.

Computer-aided diagnosis system for the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome from chest radiographs.

This paper presents a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the assessment of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) from chest radiographs. Our method consists in automatically extracting intercostal patches from chest radiographs belonging to the test database using a semiautomatic segmentation method of the ribs. Statistical and spectral features are computed from each patch then a method of feature transformation is applied using the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). A training database of 321 patches was classified by an expert in two classes, a class of normal patches and a class of abnormal patches. Patches belonging to the test database are then classified using the SVM classifier. Finally, the rate of abnormal patches is calculated for each quadrant to decide if the chest radiograph presents an ARDS. The method has been evaluated on 90 radiographs where 53 images present ARDS. The results show a sensitivity of 90.6% at a specificity of 86.5%.

Simulations for mechanical ventilation in children: review and future prospects.

Mechanical ventilation is a very effective therapy, but with many complications. Simulators are used in many fields, including medicine, to enhance safety issues. In the intensive care unit, they are used for teaching cardiorespiratory physiology and ventilation, for testing ventilator performance, for forecasting the effect of ventilatory support, and to determine optimal ventilatory management. They are also used in research and development of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and explicit computerized protocols in closed loop. For all those reasons, cardiorespiratory simulators are one of the tools that help to decrease mechanical ventilation duration and complications. This paper describes the different types of simulators described in the literature for physiologic simulation and modeling of the respiratory system, including a new simulator (SimulResp), and proposes a validation process for these simulators.