Current alarm systems on intensive care units create a very high rate of false positive alarms because most of them simply compare the physiological measurements to fixed thresholds. An improvement can be expected when the actual measurements are replaced by smoothed estimates of the underlying...

We discuss robust filtering procedures for signal extraction from noisy time series. Particular attention is paid to the preservation of relevant signal details like abrupt shifts. moving averages and running medians are widely used but have shortcomings when large spikes (outliers) or trends...

Robustified rank tests, applying a robust scale estimator, are investigated for reliable and fast shift detection in time series. The tests show good power for sufficiently large shifts, low false detection rates for Gaussian noise and high robustness against outliers. Wilcoxon scores in...

Standard median filters preserve abrupt shifts (edges) and remove impulsive noise (outliers) from a constant signal but they deteriorate in trend periods. FIR median hybrid (FMH) filters are more flexible and also preserve shifts, but they are much more vulnerable to outliers. Application of...

In modern intensive care physiological variables of the critically ill can be reported online by clinical information systems. Intelligent alarm systems are needed for a suitable bedside decision support. The existing alarm systems based on fixed treshholds produce a great number of false...

In critical care extremely high dimensional time series are generated by clinical information systems. This yields new perspectives of data recording and also causes a new challenge for statistical methodology. Recently graphical correlation models have been developed for analysing the partial...

Intelligent alarm systems are needed for adequate bedside decision support in critical care. Clinical information systems acquire physiological variables online in short time intervals. To identify complications as well as therapeutic effects procedures for rapid classification of the current...