A target control infusion method for neuromuscular blockade based on hybrid parameter estimation

The paper presents a new method for target control infusion (TCI) for neuromuscular blockade (NMB) level control of patients subject to general anaesthesia. The method combines an inversion of the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) model with a hybrid parameter estimation method that uses on-line data from the initial bolus response to estimate the model parameters. Although atracurium is considered as relaxant, the newly proposed method may be applied to other drugs for which the PK/PD model is available. Simulation results on a bank of 100 patient models are presented to demonstrate the achievable performance.