The developments of the software recognizes two user environments with different requirements:

• Clinical use
• Research use

The Clinical Edition

The objective of CytoCamTools Clinical Edition software is to support microcirculation assessment as a tool for guiding therapy at the bed side. This requires that the clinician can view and evaluate the response of the microcirculation to the application of a specific clinical intervention. As such microcirculation assessment is complementary to existing therapies.

This means that for each type of intervention a measurement protocol should be defined, specifying the following:

• The therapy it is related to
• Location of measurement (for example sub-lingual),
• Time points, such as:
  • Date/time of admission to ICU,
  • Date/time of start of therapy (for example administration of a specific drug)
  • Time since former measurement
• Intervals between time points, in case of multiple, identical measurements over a longer period of time
• Number and duration of videos at each time point,

Data related to each intervention should be recorded in a reliable way with a minimum of data-entry effort for the user

• User responsible for the measurement
• Patient
• Intervention type , with its pre-defined measurement protocol

In CytoCamTools Clinical Edition it should be possible to visually assess the condition of the microcirculation in an interactive and easy way at the bed side. Assessment results, based on an accepted scoring method and as entered by the user, should be stored for later reference and for displaying changes between time points and trends. The collected data support the physician in his decision process at the bed side.

In the future it may become possible to add specific automatic, validated and well-proven automatic data and video analysis tools, which provide immediate results and even better support the decision process.

The consistency of all data pertaining to a patient and his intervention must be strictly secured.
The access to the CytoCam data will be protected to comply with privacy regulations.

Note: it must be realized that the clinical use is still a future goal, but Braedius intends to start building the necessary data-management functionality for this environment.

The Research Edition

A secondary objective of CytoCamTools is to support the academic community to perform research studies.

For this environment a separate application is available, called the Analysis Manager.

In this environment the capturing of videos may require a slightly different data management but the need for full analysis of videos will be more demanding.

The Analysis Manager application will allow to perform analysis on any desktop, in the office of the researcher or even at home.

The CCTools Analysis Manager will have the followings objectives :

• Organization of the data around the Study performed and Subject of the study
• CCTools aims to provide a detection algorithm which determines well known parameters such as
  • Total Vessel Density (TVD)
  • Velocity per vessel
  • Perfused vessel Density (PVD)
  • Percentage of perfused vessels (PPV)
  • Hematocrit
  • Heterogenity
• Automating the analysis process as far as possible
• Provide tools for the  validation of detection results.