FPGA Implementation of a Pharmacodynamic and Pharmacokinetics (PK/PD) Model for Application in General Anesthesia

Abstract

In the application of general anesthesia, the implementations of pharmacokinetic /pharmacodynamics models (PK / PD) are a very useful tool for making decisions and analysis. These models allow us to know the behavior over time of the drug and its effect on the human body, either in an instant or in a predictive way. In this research, we built an implementation of the model PK / PD proposed by Minto for Remifentanil on an FPGA. The FPGA as an innovative and disruptive technology of the biomedical industry presents attractive features such as reprogrammability, security and control of data and execution times, fast processing, scalability, as they are described in hardware. For the solution of the Minto's PK/PD model, the numerical method fourth order Runge-Kutta was chosen. A preliminary design was made in MATLAB and compared with the ODE45 (ordinary differential equation) library of the same platform to verify the validity of the algorithm. The hardware description was made in the Quartus software in VHDL and it was implemented on an Altera DE0- Nano kit. The tests were made using Simulink's FPGA-in-the-loop strategy. The results showed that it is possible to implement this type of models on FPGAs without using special functions, with an MSE error of 4.4548x10-6 approximately, almost negligible, between the result delivered by MATLAB and the one obtained through the implementation on the Altera.