Heuristics to determine ventilation times of ICU patients from the MIMIC-II database

Mechanical ventilation is an important life support tool for patients in intensive care units (ICU). For various research purposes related to patient hemodynamic and cardiopulmonary monitoring, it is important to know when a patient is on a ventilator. Unfortunately, the widely used MIMIC-II database contains results from user charted data, where the user did not always store ventilation on and off times explicitly and accurately. The resulting ventilation-related data are subject to error. Therefore, there are no simple rules to define ventilation times retrospectively for this dataset. Hence, we designed a simple set of rules to determine the ventilation times using multiple sources of mechanical ventilator-related settings and physiological measurements by expert heuristics. The rules worked well in comparison with nursing notes regarding ventilation events. We conclude that our rule sets for determining ventilation times may be useful in assisting with MIMIC-II database analysis.