The multi-trellis software architecture and the intelligent cardiovascular monitor.

A real-time, intelligent cardiovascular monitor is complex. It must process multiple waveforms, recognize artifacts, extract pertinent parameters, recognize a patient's clinical state, analyze the problem and formulate a response. This paper presents the multi-trellis (a collection of process trellises), a software architecture for building such a monitor. A process trellis is a uniform hierarchical framework for heterogeneous program modules. The multi-trellis extension allows one to compile several process trellis programs with widely varying run-time requirements into a single executable program that it is efficient, predictable and usable. Our prototype consists of two process trellises. The lower trellis contains processes to analyze three different analog signals: the blood pressure from a non-invasive monitor and an arterial catheter, and the ECG. The upper trellis contains processes to help detect evolving hemodynamic trends, identify abnormalities, and present a succinct summary to the clinician. Our prototype shows that the multi-trellis is a demonstrably useful software architecture for building these real-time, intelligent monitors.