Depth of Anaesthesia: Measuring or guessing?

This paper is a comprehensive literature review on the Depth of Anaesthesia (DoA) monitoring problem. We first investigate the current clinical practice, then briefly introduce the DoA monitors, finally we analyse and discuss the reliability and accuracy of current DoA assessment practice. In this study we find that most of the responses suppressed by anaestheic agents are not of the central nervous system (CNS) but are responses from the peripheral nervous systems (PNS). The responses generated for drug combinations across the therapeutic ranges show considerable variations in drug concentrations that constitute adequate anaesthesia for a particular stimulus. We propose to capture the decision process of anaesthetist using neural networks as neural networks are good at finding patterns in non linear, non stationary signals.