Weanpro: a weaning protocol expert system

A description is given of WEANPRO, an expert system that assists respiratory therapists and nurses in weaning postoperative cardiovascular surgery patients from mechanical ventilation in the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU). WEANPRO suggests ventilator settings that lead the patient toward independent breathing on the basis of arterial blood gas (ABG) analysis, spontaneous effort, and hemodynamics. WEANPRO was developed using M.1, an expert system shell, and runs on any 80286- or 80386-based personal computer. The expert system was developed to increase the quality and decrease the cost of the weaning process that occurs every day in the CVICU. An evaluation revealed that WEANPRO decreased the mean number of ABG analyses necessary to wean patients from 6.2 to 3.5. A one-tailed test of hypothesis revealed that WEANPRO's mean is statistically less than the clinicians mean with a t-statistic of -4.994 and a p-value of 2.3772E-6.<
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