A team of researchers from UCLA and UC Irvine have created a unique repository of electronic health record data and high-fidelity physiological waveform data from tens of thousands of surgeries that will integrate artificial intelligence to improve patient outcomes.

The project led is by Dr. Maxime Cannesson, professor and chair of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; and Dr. Pierre Baldi, Distinguished Professor of information and computer sciences and Dr. Joe Rinehart, clinical professor of anesthesiology, both at UC Irvine. It is freely available to legitimate researchers who sign a data use agreement (DUA).

All data in the repository, called the Medical Informatics Operating Room Vitals and Events Repository (MOVER), has been stripped of patient identifiers in accordance with patient privacy laws. It can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.24432/C5VS5G

The team has published a paper describing the database and its uses in JAMIA Open.

“We expect it to help the research community to develop new algorithms, new predictive tools, to improve the care of surgical patients basically globally,” Cannesson said. “It’s the first time a surgical database like this has been released. It’s a very wide spectrum of surgeries.”

The repository, which had been in the works since 2012, fills a gap in publicly accessible databases that researchers can use to train and test AI algorithms. It is intended to advance a wide variety of healthcare research and serve as a resource to evaluate new clinical decision support and monitoring algorithms for patients undergoing surgery and anesthesia.

It contains data, collected over seven years, of hospital visits for patients undergoing surgery at UCI Medical Center, consisting of comprehensive electronic health record and high-fidelity physiological waveforms. Waveforms are data from monitors such as EKGs that measure the physiology of the patient either minute by minute or sometimes in real time, for instance during a high-risk surgical procedure.

Specifically, the dataset contains general information about each patient and their medical history, including details about the surgical procedure, medicines used, lines or drains utilized during the procedures, and postoperative complications. In all, it now contains data from nearly 59,000 patients who underwent about 83,500 surgeries.

“This information is truly information that physicians and the care team use to make clinical decisions in the acute care setting,” Cannesson said. “Before this there was no single repository where a very, very large volume of data that includes the physiological waveforms are accessible to researchers.”

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