A Clinical Decision Support System for Post-Surgical Cardiovascular Remote Monitoring

Background: Post-surgical cardiovascular monitoring places a heavy information burden on clinical teams, requiring the rapid synthesis of patient history, intraoperative data, monitoring streams, and surgical outcome evidence. Existing clinical decision support systems handle this integration poorly, and most offer little visibility into their reasoning. We present a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture designed specifically for this domain, with a focus on evidence traceability and practical workflow integration. Methods: We describe a three-layer RAG architecture comprising a retrieval layer that creates 768-dimensional representations of clinical scenarios; an augmentation layer using a stacking ensemble (Random Forest and XGBoost base learners with a logistic-regression meta-learner) to integrate patient-specific data with retrieved evidence and produce calibrated probability estimates; and a generative layer using a fine-tuned BERT classifier together with Gemini 2.5 Pro to synthesise actionable clinical recommendations. Components were prototyped on publicly available, de-identified data from MIMIC-III and the MIMIC-III-Ext-PPG benchmark to verify pipeline integrity. Proposed Evaluation Framework: This paper presents a system architecture rather than a clinically validated implementation. We outline a structured evaluation framework to assess the technical performance and clinical applicability of the RAG architecture, encompassing the technical validation of system components, expert assessment of clinical workflow integration potential, and analysis of interpretability features essential for healthcare deployment. Specific technical targets include retrieval precision >90% for relevant evidence, query response time <3 s, and a clinical appropriateness rating of >85% from expert review. Conclusions: We describe a RAG architecture for post-surgical cardiovascular monitoring in which every recommendation is linked to retrievable source documents, making the reasoning visible and challengeable. A structured evaluation framework is proposed to guide the system towards clinical validation.