This invention provides a method and apparatus for controlling the type of information displayed at each display pixel on the video monitor of a video display system. A number of video RAMs are provided which number is at least equal to the number of different types of information. A bitmap is stored for each type of information in the video RAMs in interspersed fashion, a selected number of bits for select display pixels of the bitmap for a given type of information being simultaneously stored in said RAMs, followed for each RAM by the selected number of bits for the same selected display pixels for the bitmap of at least one other information type. No more than one bitmap bit for a given display pixel is stored in any video RAM. The addressing of the RAMs for read out of the bitmap is shifted so that bits for the same display pixels for all of the bitmaps are simultaneously read out from the RAMs. The bits of the bitmaps for each display pixel are then prioritized, the prioritizing including determining and generating an indication of the type of information which has priorty and is to be displayed at each display pixel.
A screen display circuit apparatus comprising a plurality of screen display circuits for displaying stored font data as display patterns is provided, whereby the variation of displays is increased, e.g., characters can be shifted or overwritten, etc. when displayed.
A method and apparatus is disclosed for reading display data from the same area in display memory and processing the display data as video pixel data or graphics pixel data depending on the state of at least one tag bit stored with the data. The apparatus receives display data from display memory, separates at least one tag bit from the display data and uses at least one tag bit in a controller to enable processing display data as video pixel data or graphics pixel data in each processing step. Video pixels may be corrected for missing color components with stored value if previous or next pixel in pipeline is graphics. Display memory and display memory bandwidth may be conserved by enabling video pixel data formats and graphics pixel data formats to be stored within the same display memory area.
Method and apparatus for implementing a raster graphic display video data path that provides arbitrary mixing of a plurality of images. The video data path is highly parallelized, and employs parallel devices operating under the control of a set of look-up tables. The look-up tables are loadable from a controller, such as a host workstation. The raster graphic display video data path functions with unlimited screen resolutions, and also enables a variety of different pixel data formats from a potentially large number of different sources. Outputs from several image sources are mixed under the control of the host workstation, with a resultant pixel value being based on (a) a combined translucency coefficient (alpha) of the images, for each image source, and (b) a window identification number assigned by the host workstation. Pixel value conversion to a common predetermined format provides coherency between pixel values generated by a number of different image sources, such as HDTV and graphics servers. A separate frame buffer is allocated for each of the sources.
A system and method for displaying medical information derived from a plurality of sources is described. Medical data associated with a patient are acquired from at least one of the plurality of sources on the network. The acquired data are prioritized for display in a desired order and/or time frame. A menu generator is used for generating a composite window for displaying the ordered acquired data in a first window together with at least one of user-entered medical notes, medical laboratory results and ventilator data in a second window.
