Asbru’s Execution Engine: Utilizing Guidelines for Artificial Ventilation of Newborn Infants

In real-world environments of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), a major challenge in using clinical guidelines and protocols in a computer readable form is to provide (i) a clear, precise representation to handle the complex forms of uncertainty and timecritical situations which are common in the ICU domain and (ii) an execution engine to be able to tackle such a representation. This paper presents an execution unit tailored to a particular guideline-representation language called Asbru. Asbru is able to capture the required features to proceed with guideline-based care within NICUs. We have evaluated our execution engine by modelling the artificial ventilation of newborn infants in Asbru and by applying our execution engine to real patient data and Asbru plans.