The term “Big Data” originated at the 11th Electronic Materials Conference World Annual Conference, which originally referred to the large amount of data generated by the application of technology.[1] Medical big data includes not only the medical history and examination data accumulated during patient hospitalization, but also patient-related follow-up data, prognostic data from outpatient, emergency, and medical insurance settlement departments as well as clinical experiment centers. So far, it has profound applications in the various specialties of medicine.[2–4] However, intensive care medicine (ICU) is different from other medical fields. In comparison with clinical practice data, medical data in ICU have the following characteristics: large scale, rapid production, diverse dimensions, inaccuracies, heterogeneity, incompleteness, complexity, and privacy concerns.[5] In fact, in the process of constructing major ICU databases in China and worldwide, these databases have been optimized at great length. Taking heterogeneity as an example, the possible formats for medical data include text type, digital type, and image type. Text-based data include demographic characteristics, drug use, medical history, and symptoms. Digital data include various laboratory test results, vital signs, and monitoring instrument data. Image-type data include various imaging evaluations, such as type-B ultrasound, computerized tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray, and other examinations. In the formation of a database, standardized formats for text-type data are required. For digital data, the time of the collection is emphasized, and trends in treatment methods and various indicators are considered. For image data, in addition to conventional imaging reports, an artificial intelligence image reading model could be established by combining diagnoses and image characteristics. So far, China has not yet reached an industry-standard consensus in the field of critical care medicine. The Critical Care Medicine Branch of the China Health Information and Health Care Big Data Society was established in March 2019 and aims to establish and promote critical care big data applications. After a comprehensive investigation, it was found that quantity and quality of ICU database construction were limited. More effort should be made to improve this situation. We fully believe that the development of China's critical care databases will make utmost of big data platform, which could provide patients with better diagnosis and treatment processes, provide management decision-makers with accurate and objective diagnosis and provide medical researchers with a higher-quality data.
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