Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5.5
Chapter 5.5
Virtual instrumentation
Eric Rosow
Successful organizations have the ability to measure and
to act on key indicators and events in real time. By
leveraging the power of virtual instrumentation (VI) and
open-architecture standards, multidimensional executive
dashboards can empower health care organizations to
make better and faster data driven decisions. This
chapter will high-light ways in which user-defined virtual
instruments and dashboards can connect to hospital
information systems (e.g., Admission/Discharge/Trans-
fer (ADT) systems and patient monitoring networks)
and utilize statistical process control (SPC) to ''visualize''
information and to make timely, data driven decisions.
The case studies described will illustrate enterprise-wide
solutions for:
Bed management and census control
Operational management, data mining and business
intelligence applications
Clinical applications
data glut in many organizations. The health care industry,
in particular, generates a tremendous amount of data.
Tools such as databases and spreadsheets certainly help to
manage and analyze these data, however databases, while
ideal for extracting data, are generally not suited for
graphing and analysis. Spreadsheets, on the other hand,
are ideal for analyzing and graphing data, but this process
can be cumbersome when working with multiple data
files. Virtual instruments empower the user to leverage
the best of both worlds by creating a suite of user-defined
applications that allow the end-user to convert vast
amounts of data into information that is ultimately
transformed into knowledge to enable better, faster de-
cision making.
Benefits of user-defined virtual
instruments
The benefits of VI are increased performance and re-
duced costs. Because the user controls the technology
through software, the flexibility of VI is unmatched by
traditional instrumentation. The modular, hierarchical
programming environment of VI is inherently reusable
and reconfigurable.
In effect, VI allows the user to ''morph'' (i.e., replicate
and/or customize) the functionality of traditional
''vendor-defined'' instruments (such as the oscilloscope
shown in Figure 5.5-1 ) into virtual ''user-defined'' in-
struments on a standard computer or personal digital
assistant (PDA).
VI applications have encompassed nearly every in-
dustry, including the telecommunications, automotive,
semiconductor and biomedical industries. In the fields of
health care and biomedical engineering, VI has empow-
ered developers and end-users to conceive of, develop,
and implement
Background
VI allows organizations to effectively harness the
power of the PC, to access, analyze, and share in-
formation throughout the organization. With vast
amounts of data available from increasingly sophisti-
cated enterprise-level data sources, potentially useful
information is often left hidden, due to a lack of useful
tools. Virtual instruments can employ a wide array of
technologies, such as multidimensional analyses and
SPC tools, to detect patterns, trends, causalities, and
discontinuities to derive knowledge and to make in-
formed decisions.
Today's enterprises create vast amounts of raw data,
and recent advances in storage technology; coupled with
the desire to use these data competitively, has caused a
a wide variety of
research-based
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