Control and Automation in Anaesthesia

Book excerpt: 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.