Automatic blood pressure control is a technique that regulates the infusion rates of pharmacological agents automatically to maintain a patient’s mean arterial pressure within a desired level. Patients under blood pressure regulation treatment are usually in cardiac surgery or suffering from postsurgical hypertension or other cardiac diseases with abnormal arterial blood pressure. This treatment is usually performed by experienced personnel in the operation room or intensive care unit, which is very difficult and time consuming. An automatic controller that could deliver drugs based on a patient’s physiologic conditions safely and effectively without human intervention would be beneficial to both patients and medical care personnel.
This article reviews various automatic control schemes that have been developed to regulate mean arterial pressure for patients with postsurgical hypertension using sodium nitroprusside proportional‐derivative‐integral controllers, adaptive controllers, rule‐based controllers, and neural‐network based controllers are common control strategies described in the literature. A brief description of each control scheme is provided, followed by examples of controller designs from the literature. Evaluations of the controller performance in computer simulation, animal studies, or clinical tests on human subjects are discussed.