On the practical use of a PID-based control scheme for automatic control of general anesthesia

Despite promising results have been obtained in clinical trials, closed-loop control systems for general anesthesia are not routinely used in the clinical practice yet. One of the possible reasons is that problems related to their practical implementation are not fully solved. In particular, a control system must be able to cope with manual interventions from the anesthesiologist and to operate with different devices commonly available in surgery rooms. In this paper we present experimental results where a PID-based control system has been tested when drug boluses are manually administered by the anesthesiologist and when different syringe pumps are used. The performance of the control system has been assessed on a group of nine patients undergoing elective plastic surgery. Results demonstrate that the control system is capable to handle these practical issues and it is therefore suitable to be used in the clinical practice.