OpenICE – Open-Source ICE Reference Implementation


The MD PnP Program developed an open-source reference implementation of the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) standard, AAMI 2700-1 (previously published as standard ASTM 2761-09). Development was initially performed under an NIH/NIBIB Quantum “Medical Moonshot” U01 award.
Novel applications enabled by interoperability between medical devices and apps on an ICE platform, such as smart alarms, physiologic closed-loop control algorithms, data visualization, AI-enabled applications, and clinical research data collection, can be rapidly prototyped with OpenICE. There is a dedicated OpenICE webpage on GitHub that provides more detail on OpenICE.

The platform consists of a many demonstration applications as well as software adapters for a wide variety of medical devices (such as infusion pumps, ventilators, and patient monitors), and medical device and patient simulations, running on a platform using RTI Connext – Real-Time Innovations (RTI) implementation of the OMG-standard Data Distribution Service (DDS). RTI Connext enables OpenICE to support distributed platform services such as data logging and data quality monitoring.

OpenICE is being used by academic researchers and manufactures to reduce the time and cost of prototyping novel implementations.

MD PnP Content on GitHub

The MD PnP GitHub open-source project was established to publicly share code and documentation developed by the Medical Device Plug-and-Play program and its collaborators. OpenICE GitHub artifacts include implementations of protocols used to connect to medical devices, as well as implementations of user interfaces, messaging infrastructure, and data models.

Read about V2.0 – a major update to OpenICE.

(Note – The OpenICE project has been hosted by several open-source repositories since 2012. It was transitioned to GitHub in June 2015.) 

RTI Connext in OpenICE

RTI has collaborated on the inclusion of RTI Connext run-time libraries in OpenICE, which provides a secure network middleware complying with the OMG DDS standard. RTI offers an academic / university license program with access to content and tools that facilitate building, testing, integrating, and deploying high-performance, mission critical, distributed systems.

Example of Artifacts Available from our Collaborators

The University of Illinois Engineering Wiki contained open source code for MD PnP JavaScript Testing with Jasmine.

Kansas State University’s MDCF page provided open-source Medical Device Coordination Framework (MDCF) for exploring solutions related to designing, implementing, verifying, and certifying, systems of integrated medical devices.

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