Abstract The practice of medicine often requires procedures that cause pain and anxiety. With the advent of modern anaesthesia these procedures have become commonplace and tolerable. Procedures with the greatest…

Abstract Conscious patients undergoing regional anaesthesia are able to interact with caregivers and indicate when they are feeling pain and/or anxiety during surgery. Unconscious patients on the other hand, not…

Abstract General anaesthesia (GA) is a reversible drug-induced state of altered arousal required for more than 60,000 surgical procedures each day in the USA alone, making it one of the…

Abstract The goal of pharmacological treatment is a desired response, known as the target effect (e.g. bispectral index of 50). An understanding of the concentration–response relationship (i.e. pharmacodynamics (PD)) can…

Abstract Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modelling is a discipline currently under the umbrella of pharmacometrics, and aims to describe, understand and predict the time course of in vivo drug action. In general…

Abstract Modern anaesthesia and sedation consists of giving combinations of hypnotic and analgesic drugs to obtain the desired anaesthetic effect. Understanding how these drugs interact to create the anaesthetic state…

Abstract In a recent review of the performance of closed-loop systems in anaesthesia, Brogi et al [2] defined a closed-loop system as an automated control system designed to maintain a…

Abstract Monitoring during anaesthesia is based on the measurement of physiological signals that are recorded during surgical or other procedures requiring anaesthetic drug administration. The methods used to process these…

Abstract Because there is no disease condition that can be treated with the administration of anaesthetic medications, the specialty of anaesthesiology does not possess a curative effect in itself. Nevertheless,…