A NEW REPRESENTATION OF ACID-BASE DISTURBANCES

The acid-base status of intensive care patients is monitored on the ba sis of three quantities. The graphical representation which may be of help for the monitoring task is therefore cumbersome. The classical Si ggaard-Andersen acid-base chart is such a representation, but it is on ly suited for evaluating one acid-base status at a time and not for re presenting acid-base paths. A new representation, obtained after a pri ncipal components transformation is presented. It is shown that the re presentation is characteristic for the laboratory instrument used. Its most attractive feature is that it is distortionless with respect to the three-dimensional configuration.