Contributions to a decision support system based on depth of anesthesia signals

In the clinical practice the concerns about the administration of hypnotics and analgesics for minimally invasive diagnostics and therapeutic procedures have enormously increased in the past years. The automatic detection of changes in the signals used to evaluate the depth of anesthesia is hence of foremost importance in order to decide how to adapt the doses of hypnotics and analgesics that should be administered to patients. The aim of this work is to online detect drifts in the referred depth of anesthesia signals of patients undergoing general anesthesia. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated using BIS records previously collected from patients subject to abdominal surgery. The results show that the drifts detected by the proposed method are in accordance with the actions of the clinicians in terms of times where a change in the hypnotic or analgesic rates had occurred. This detection was performed under the presence of noise and sensor faults. The presented algorithm was also online validated. The results encourage the inclusion of the proposed algorithm in a decision support system based on depth of anesthesia signals.