Decision support for depressed cranial fractures

And here is number 5 out of 5 of the surgical guidelines of the Brain Trauma Foundation: depressed cranial fractures. In my earlier posts you read about on epidural hematoma, acute subdural hematoma, traumatic parenchymal lesions, and posterior fossa mass lesions. Before implementing the final part I needed to fix a technical problem. I ended up creating a workaround that does the job, so here we go…

Step 1: the original text-version of the guideline’s recommendations

Step 2: create a flowchart

(click for full size version)

Note that the double line around the first decision moment is my way to indicate that both factors should be present (a logical AND-operator).

Step 3: convert into an app!

As you can see, the text is a little too long for the iPhone’s display. Of course, on iPad there is no problem because of the larger screen. I have not tested this one on Android yet. At least this is something I have to work on, probably I should decrease the font size on iPhone a little bit.

So, here is how the full Brain Trauma Foundation section on the surgical guidelines look in the iPhone menu of NeuroMind 2:

Now they’re just in the order in which they appear in the guidelines. Probably I will change this into alphabetical order later on…