Adaptive and neural network adaptive control of depth of anesthesia during surgery

Control system technology has a great deal to offer pharmacology, anesthesia, and critical care medicine. Critical care patients, whether undergoing surgery or recovering in intensive care units, require drug administration to regulate physiological variables such as blood pressure, cardiac output, heart rate, and degree of consciousness. The rate of infusion of each administered drug is critical, requiring constant monitoring and frequent adjustments. Open-loop control by clinical personnel can be tedious, imprecise, time consuming, and sometimes of poor quality. Alternatively, closed-loop control can potentially achieve desirable system performance in the face of the highly uncertain and hostile environment of surgery and the intensive care unit. In this paper, we validate our recent adaptive and neuro adaptive feedback control algorithms for clinical pharmacology via a series of simulation experiments and clinical evaluation trials. The clinical trials demonstrate excellent regulation of unconsciousness allowing for a safe and effective administration of the anesthetic agent propofol.