Sepsis Diagnosis Assistant

Designed a program to assist in sepsis diagnoses
Intro to Engineering Project

Problem Statement

1 in 3 sepsis diagnoses will result in death (1) and medical errors resulted in 251,000 deaths in the United States in the year of 2017 (2).

A program to assist a doctor in making the diagnosis of sepsis should do no harm by providing accurate advising, use data already in the medical records of a patient, and perform the SIRS and SOFA calculations.

Approach

A Gannt chart was developed to define the deliverables needed to complete the program and the class.

The main features of the program were broken into the following methods: patient, read, clean, search, repeatRemover, and printFormat.

Final Product

The entry box allows for a patients ID number to be entered, here the program will retrieve the patient's file from a database, lower the cases, remove special characters, extract symptoms listed in the record, remove repeats, and add them to an array.

SIRS is a diagnostic tool that assigns points to vital signs, after they are entered into the boxes the score is calculated and saved to an integer variable.

SOFA is a diagnostic tool that assigns points to vital signs, after they are entered into the boxes the score is calculated and saved to an integer variable.

The final print out screen provides the provider with a wholistic and organized view of the information available. This allows the provider to make an informed decision and treat their patient accordingly.

Problems Encountered

In a patient's medical record, a medical provider would leave notes such as "return to hospital if you develop a fever".

The search method would pick up these 'symptoms' and add them to the list of symptoms the patient did not have.

To prevent this from happening, the search method excludes any symptoms following the most common phrases, such as: denies, no, etc.

Skills Advanced

  • Programming

  • Organization

  • Project management

  • Problem Solving