Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Computer controlled, or automatic, drug delivery is the process of administering a therapeutic regime to a patient with computer assistance for calculation of optimal dose and delivery schedules. Computer control can improve drug therapy by reducing drug usage and costs, by permitting health care staff to work more efficiently and to provide better standard of care, by allowing the safe use of drugs that are difficult to administer, and by compensation for human failings with computer strengths, such as unlimited attention span and patience, and capacity for quick, accurate and redundant calculation. Our goal is to develop an automatic control system for anesthesia and to demonstrate its efficacy, safety and benefits in an operating room. We will concentrate on neuromuscular blockade (NMB) drugs because of their relative absence of toxicity, other than that associated with its desired effect, paralysis. NMB drugs produce paralysis in surgeries, permitting surgeons to make smaller incisions, providing access to deep anatomical structures otherwise hindered by unconscious muscle action and facilitating intubation of the trachea. Once the methods and algorithms involved in computer control for NMB are proven to be safe, effective and robust to patient variance for the relatively safe NMB drugs, the system will be adapted for intra-venous anesthetics and analgesics and vapour anesthetics. In no way will the proposed system replace the anesthesiolohist, but rather just like an autopilot does for a pilot, the proposed system will extend the anesthesiologist's abilities and improve patient safety and quality of care.