A problem-snapshot view of patient history data for cardiac preoperative evaluation

Preoperative risk evaluation is a very important work before a cardiac surgery. Clinicians always have to spend much time reviewing the information about operative risk factors. In this paper, we have made a few tentative attempts to help clinicians improve the efficiency of risk evaluation. First a surgery-problem network for cardiac surgeries is built to extract the associated medical problems from patient history problems. Then a set of data filter rules are defined for each medical problem to retrieve the required data, which is clustered around the problems and forms a set of snapshots. After that, we propose a multi-level-timeline method to visualize the problems and snapshots extracted. Finally, a special problem-snapshot visualization tool for cardiac preoperative evaluation is designed and developed as a result. The tool provides a quick way of reviewing the information which is helpful for cardiac preoperative risk evaluation through information visualization technology. It can save a lot of tedious work.