SBIR-STTR Award

The primary goal is to develop a specialized software tool to help the clinical investigator explore complex time-oriented clinical data. In Phase 1, we plan to collaborate with investigators from the Developmental Epidemiology Network to select data analysis, summarization, and display techniques appropriate to their research. We also plan to implement these techniques in prototype form and evaluate their utility in connection with a large database of measurements on pre-term newborns. The major technical innovation in this project is expected to be the development of an object-oriented software system that can handle the full complexity of clinical data, give the clinical investigator the ability to use advanced graphical techniques, and help generate and evaluate hypotheses about the data. The major health-related contribution is hoped to be an increase in the ability of the clinician to perceive subtle trends and interrelationships in patient data. Our experience in Phase I will become the basis of a Phase II proposal to develop a prototype software product for wider evaluation and validation. The software has strong commercial appeal in providing more powerful information-handling capabilities to investigators in clinical studies and clinical trials worldwide.Awardee's statement of the potential commercial applications of the research: The software to explore time-oriented clinical data has direct application to academic and government clinical studies as well as clinical trials in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

We will develop new display software for visualizing complex, time-oriented clinical data. Phase I, carried out in collaboration with the Developmental Epidemiology Network, focused on a large database of intervention and response measurements from pre-term newborns in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Major accomplishments in Phase I were to identify the requirements for effective visualization of this data, and to prototype an approach and a set of specific display techniques to meet these requirements.A key insight during Phase I was that similar visualization capabilities are applicable to patient monitoring and patient care as well as to clinical and epidemiological research. Phase II will extend our collaboration to include physicians associated with the management and automation of ICU's in hospitals in the Boston area. The goal will be the prototype implementation of 'ClinScope', an innovative object-oriented software system that embodies intelligent graphical presentation techniques for time-oriented data to help with both clinical data exploration and medical decision support. The major health-related contribution of ClinScope is to enhance the ability of the physician to gain insight from the ever-increasing volumes of recorded measurements.National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)