Ventilator Data Extraction with a Video Display Image Capture and Processing System

Medical hardware and software device interoperability standards are not uniform. The result of this lack of standardization is that information available on clinical devices may not be readily or freely available for import into other systems for research, decision support, or other purposes. We developed a novel system to import discrete data from an anesthesia machine ventilator by capturing images of the graphical display screen and using image processing to extract the data with off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. We were able to successfully capture and verify live ventilator data from anesthesia machines in multiple operating rooms and store the discrete data in a relational database at a substantially lower cost than vendor-sourced solutions.