An Explicit Reference Governor Scheme for Closed-Loop Anesthesia

Abstract

This paper proposes a constrained control scheme for the control of the depth of hypnosis in clinical anesthesia. The proposed scheme guarantees overdosing prevention while taking into account infusion rate limits and safety constraints on the plasma concentration. The core idea is to formulate anesthesia as a constrained control problem and design a closed-form control scheme based on the explicit reference governor philosophy. More precisely, the proposed architecture consists of a stabilizing control loop and of an add-on control unit that is able to ensure the constraints satisfaction at all times. In this paper, this architecture has been implemented within the iControl system, a platform for clinical evaluation of control schemes. The proposed scheme is evaluated on a simulated surgical procedure for 44 patients. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can deliver propofol to yield induction time of (mean) 6.24 [min], while satisfying the imposed safety constraints.