Control and Automation in Anesthesia

This book records the presentations given at a workshop held in Bonn in May 1994. The aim of the meeting was to bring together scientists from various disciplines and clinicians to discuss within a group of experts the theoretical, medical, engineering, and regulatory aspects of automated control of therapeutic interventions in. anaesthesiology. The meeting was considered a continuation of a preceding work­ shop on "Quantitation, Modelling and Control in Anaesthesia" [1], which was held also in Bonn 10 years ago in May 1984. That workshop dealt with problems of how to quantitate concepts like anaesthetic depth, how to model anaesthetic drug disposition, how to link phar­ macokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and how to use such concepts for the control of anaesthetic drug delivery. With respect to these topics the current proceedings have simultaneously both a broadened and a narrowed perspective. It is broadened in so far as the topics of the workshop did not focus exclusively on anaesthetic drugs and the control of their delivery, but did also discuss anaesthesia machine monitoring and patients therapeutic monitoring as well as control of blood pressure and artificial ventilation. The proceedings have nar­ rowed the perspective insofar as they do not intensively discuss the processes of quantitation and modelling but presuppose them and give more room to control, especially automated control. During the past 10 years informatics has tremendously expanded its knowledge and methods applicable to control problems.

Some of the latest developments in the automation of therapeutic interventions in anaesthesiology have been covered in this book, with special emphasis on the automated control of anaesthetic drug delivery, neuromuscular blockade, artificial ventilation, and blood pressure. Of particular interest to the reader will be the presentation of different methodological approaches to automated control such as neuronal nets, fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy control and model-based adaptive approaches and their application to different clinical problems. The open-loop and closed-loop approaches to automated control have been discussed as have the requirements necessary for monitoring biological signals and the paramters for the anaesthesia machines with particular focus on recently developed feedback methods for the automated delivery of volatile and intravenous anaesthetic agents based on EEG or evoked potentials. The last chapter discusses the legal requirements and liability aspects for automated systems in medicine, especially in view of recently established regulations and guidelines (e.g. law for medical products).
The book represents the proceedings of an international workshop which was held in Bonn, Germany, in May 1994. The contributions come from various specialties, including medicine and anaesthesiology, but also mathematics and operations research, neuroinformatics, engineering, regulatory authorities, and industry.