Descripció del projecte
Analgesia and depth of anaesthesia monitoring is a growing need in the operation rooms and in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) as well. There are monitors currently available in the market however, the decision of the infusion of more drugs still lies on the specialists, based on their expertise and the information provided by these devices.
The aim of this project is to develop a clinical advisory system that allows, through the analysis of physiological signals, to determine the anaesthetic and analgesic state of the patient. By means of this information the system should show to the anaesthetist the current state of the patient, the current infused dose and the recommended dose, if necessary. The physiological signals targeted in this project will be mainly electroencephalographic but the influence of the hemodynamic variables (cardiac output, cardiac frequency, heart rate variability) and electromyogram shall be considered as well.
The main stages of the project shall be:
State of the Art – Review of the literature of physiological signals that are considered indicators of the aneasthetic state and analgesia of patients. Review of the most common pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models and their characteristics.
Study of the physiological signals during anaesthesia – Study of the available physiological signals and identification of the ones that play a more relevant role, to be considered as inputs of the clinical advisory system. For that purpose, different techniques of signal processing (noise cancellation, filtering, feature extraction) and statistics shall be applied.
Study of the effects of the anaesthetic drugs in the physiological signals previously identified – modeling of the effects of the anaesthetic drugs for each of the selected signals (besides the EEG).
Design of the clinical advisory system – design of a clinical advisory system that, by means of the identified physiological signals, estimates the clinical state of the patient and suggests to the anaesthetist changes on infused doses, if necessary.
System validation – lastly, the system shall be validated in a clinical environment.
The last stage of the project shall consist of preparation and defense of the thesis.
It should be noted that within the frame of this project, collaboration is offered with several cutting-edge clinical centers in the anaesthesia field, domestic and international.
