ACHE: An Architecture for Clinical Hypothesis Examination

Physiological monitoring equipment can be found in many hospital settings. This allows a wide range of physiological parameters to be stored, which in turn allows clinicians and analysts to investigate a range of medical hypotheses. This paper introduces ACHE (architecture for clinical hypotheses examination), a framework specifically designed to support the preparation of such analyses. To evaluate the initial version of ACHE, a study to detect acute myocardial infarctions, was conducted with data from Glasgow Royal Infirmary's Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Initial results from the study are very encouraging and ACHE substantially reduced the time required to perform the study. A study of the same phenomena across a much larger patient dataset will be undertaken shortly.