Integrated Information Recording

Abstract

“The medical scene can be looked upon as a struggle to organize medical knowledge in such a way that it will be more useful to clinicians” (HALL, 1970). So an instrumental technique for diagnosis as developed here, should present its results in such a way, that they fit in the standardized basic data set used in the hospital (EPHRAIM,1974). Therefore, integrated recording of measurement results in combination with patient and administrative data was judged necessary. Coding has been chosen in accordance with the catheterization report form as used in the clinic. Recent technological developments made it possible to encode sufficient patient and administrative data together with measurement-results into the videosignal which carries the X-ray picture information, and record this combination on magnetic material. This is a logical extension of developments in cineangiocardiography, where extra information is recorded on the cinefilm by an optical path (MUDD,1960; STEWART,1969).It constitutes one of the functions of display systems in biomedical research (PERKINS,1971). Besides X-ray pictures, many measurements are taken during catheterization. Traditionally, the recording of these are made on several media, e.g. paper, oscilloscope screen or analog magnetic tape. In biplane cineangiocardiography, pairing of the corresponding pictures of the two films presents a time consuming problem, as well as sorting time markings on other recordings to collect the data in their proper time relationship. Furthermore, all registrations have to bear a patient identification, the date and other alphanumeric data. Even a semi-automatic protocol as described by REDLER (1972) still requires subsequent combination of radiographs and other data. With regard to the way of interpretation, this information can be divided into categories:

• Morphologic information (X-ray pictures);

• Analog data as a waveform (ECG, pressure curves);

• Momentarily values of analog measurement results (LV and aortic pressure values, RR-intervals);

• Digital numbers (parameters of the measurement system, frame numbers);

• Alphanumeric information (patient identification, diagnostic data,date, name of physician, time).