About & Editorial Policy
Connect the physiology. Understand the evidence. Navigate critical care.
ICU Knowledge Map is an educational reference for ICU learners and clinicians. It organizes critical care knowledge as an interconnected graph — clinical problems link to physiology, diagnosis, management, complications, guidelines, and the evidence behind each recommendation — rather than as a collection of standalone articles. Every topic follows the same five-tier source hierarchy, shown below and displayed on every topic page.
Foundation
Irwin & Rippe is the foundational textbook
Foundational physiology, pathophysiology, and general management principles are synthesized and written for ICU Knowledge Map, using Irwin & Rippe's Intensive Care Medicine as a conceptual framework alongside cited guidelines and primary literature. The project does not intentionally reproduce textbook pages, figures, tables, or extended passages; topics identify the sources used in their Sources & Provenance section.
Guidelines
Guidelines provide current recommendations
Recommendations are drawn from professional society guidelines (e.g. SCCM, ATS, ESICM), paraphrased with the organization, year, and strength shown, and linked back to the source society where available. A guideline recommendation is never presented as though it were the trial finding it's based on.
Primary Evidence
Primary trials provide original evidence
Landmark and recent trials are presented with what the trial itself found kept explicitly separate from how the field currently interprets that finding and from what guidelines now recommend as a result. A positive result is never treated as automatic justification for universal adoption.
Synthesis
Systematic reviews synthesize evidence
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are used to show where a body of trials agrees or disagrees, and to surface sensitivity to how the underlying studies differ — not as a substitute for reading the individual trials they pool.
Current Status
Every topic states how current its sourcing is
Each topic's Sources & Provenance section includes a Current Status line naming the most recent guideline cycle or trial the content has actually been checked against. Where that check hasn't been done yet, the field says so explicitly rather than being left to imply the content is up to date.
Sources are independently verified
Every trial, guideline, and systematic review entry is checked against its own primary publication before it's added — not generated or inferred. Where a citation, a statistic, or a recommendation hasn't been verified yet, the content says so with an explicit TODO marker rather than presenting an unverified claim as settled. Topics still at that stage are labeled as placeholders, not as finished content.
AI-assisted drafting & editorial responsibility
AI tools may be used to assist drafting, organization, or software development. Medical content is intended to be checked against the cited source hierarchy and remains under editorial responsibility; AI output is not treated as a primary medical source and the platform does not provide autonomous patient-specific clinical decisions.
Illustration provenance
Medical illustrations shipped with this release are AI-generated for ICU Knowledge Map and reviewed or edited for educational use. No third-party textbook or journal figures are intentionally included. References shown with an illustration support its medical content; they are not claims that the illustration was reproduced from those sources.
Question-bank provenance
The clinical-reasoning MCQs in this project are project-authored educational questions, not transcriptions of a commercial textbook or question bank. They may test standard clinical facts and scenarios that are also discussed in the medical literature.
Learning analytics & question quality
For signed-in users, learning progress is synced to the shared account. Question-attempt events may also be stored securely and aggregated to identify questions that are unusually easy, difficult, or poorly discriminating. Individual learner identities are not displayed in the editorial quality dashboard, and these metrics are used to improve educational content rather than to make clinical or employment decisions.
Not an official publication
ICU Knowledge Map is an independent, unofficial reference. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a publication of Irwin & Rippe, Elsevier, or any of the professional societies whose guidelines it cites (including SCCM, ATS, and ESICM). References to those sources are citations, not claims of association.
ICU Knowledge Map is an educational reference, not a substitute for clinical judgment, institutional protocols, or the primary literature it summarizes.