long-distance screening of tube misplacement and
dislodgment. The method can be easily integrated in
all patient monitoring systems. Moreover, the system
can be used to improve medical professionals
training.
The proposed method is computationally
efficient. Specifically, all of the algorithms used in
this work were implemented in Matlab R2016a 64bit.
Using a conventional PC equipped with Dual Intel
Xeon 3.4 GHz with a 16 GBytes of RAM, feature
extraction requires less than 1 second for each image.
Future improvements are the inclusion of other
anatomical landmarks, such as vocal cords, and the
development of a video-analysis algorithm, which are
expected to improve confirmation performances.
The results are encouraging, but clearly much
work is needed to further validate the proposed
approach. The available database consists of only 10
cow intubation videos and 8 human intubation videos.
A much larger database is required in order to reliably
validate system performance. Various factors might
challenge the system performance, especially fog and
secretions, which could result in poor image quality.
In addition, the effect of possible physiological
variability between patients on system performance is
yet to be evaluated.
Our ultimate goal is to develop a reliable, cost-
effective, easy to use and fully automatic device for
confirmation of correct tube positioning. For this
purpose, we plan to develop an advanced prototype,
which will be thoroughly evaluated in pre-clinical
trials and, upon receiving the appropriate regulatory
approvals, on humans. Based on this preliminary
study, we believe that implementation of the
proposed method into a real-time confirmation
system will lead to a major improvement in the ability
to detect intubation incidents as they occur, while the
patient is still well oxygenated and stable.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The ANN-based classification system achieved a
high precision of 97.9% and 97.5% for the cow and
human datasets, respectively. The results are
encouraging but as mentioned above, more research
is needed in order to reliably validate system
performance. With these challenges in mind,
successful implementation of the proposed method
into a real-time confirmation system can serve as a
major contribution to patient safety.
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