Anaesthesia simulators for the design of supervisory rule-based control in the operating theatre

Abstract

The development of online drug administration strategies in operating theatres represents a highly safety-critical situation. The usefulness of different levels of simulation prior to clinical trials has been shown in previous studies in muscle relaxant anaesthesia. Thus, in earlier work on pole-placement self-tuning for muscle relaxation a dual computer real-time simulation was undertaken, subsequent to algorithm validation via off-line simulation. In the present approach a supervised rule-based control algorithm is used. The control software was implemented on the actual machine to be used in theatre, while another computer acted as a real-time patient simulator. This set-up has further advantages of providing accurate timing and also finite data accuracy via the ADC/DAC interface, or the equivalent digital lines. Also, it provides for the controller design fast simulation studies compared with the real-time application.