Design And Implementation Of A Dynamically Configurable Medical Device Gateway

With the development of modern medical technology, a large number of advanced medical devices have been widely used all over departments of auxiliary and diagnosis, intensive care unit, operating room and emergency room. It is essential to integrate various medical devices and share medical device information for ensuring the patient safety, improving the care quality and efficiency of healthcare and optimizing the healthcare workflow. However, these medical devices are often provided by different manufacturers so that they have different hardware interface, communication protocol and data format. While the existing integration solutions are inefficient which result in vast quantities of medical information left in the devices.In order to resolve the problems, this thesis proposes to design a medical device gateway which supports multiple hardware interfaces, multiple communication protocols and multiple data formats. The proposed gateway can generate message handling mechanism for specific medical device through dynamic configuration to realize automatic data transmission and transformation. The main work includes:(?) This thesis reviews the research progress of information integration of medical device and compares the existing integrating solutions and profiles. Given the fact that the diversity of medical device in healthcare environment exists, this thesis analyzes the main challenges of the integration deeply and proposes to design and implement the dynamically configurable medical device gateway to improve integration efficiency.(?) This thesis comprehensively analyzes the integration requirement of device data from several aspects including physical connection, data communication, syntactic analysis and semantic transformation. On the basis of detailed research of the existing integrated architecture at home and abroad, this thesis proposes to design gateway architecture based on Enterprise Service Bus to ensure extensibility and independence.(?) This thesis has an in-depth analysis of the message framework of Mule ESB which has been widely used in industry environment. Architecture of medical device gateway based on Mule ESB is proposed on this basis. Mule ESB is used as a processing and control center for gateway message processing and communication; each receiver, filter, transformer and transmitter processes medical data independently; establishing data channel via dynamic assembly of these basic components is supported by configuration tool.(?) In the Implementation of gateway, many core components are deployed and a preliminary component library is established. Also a configuration tool is developed for dynamic configuration.(?) Considering the difficulty of ECG devices integration, a practice of using the developed gateway in ECG integration has been carried out. Five ECG devices are integrated into ECG information system through the component configuration based on the integration requirement of a third-grade class-A hospital.The practical results show that the proposed Medical device gateway can realize dynamic assembly based on the component library and improve the efficiency of heterogeneous medical devices integration.