Knowledge of Pharmacokinetics and the Anesthesia Control Loop

Abstract

Pharmacokinetics plays an important role in the delivery of anesthesia. Their complex nature creates a challenging control task for anesthesiologists while delivering anesthesia. The anesthesia domain confronts many known control difficulties such as non-linearity, oscillations, and sub-optimal feedback. A clinician's understanding of pharmacokinetics plays an important role in tracking performance. Information about anesthesiologists' knowledge of pharmacokinetics was collected and analyzed. Effects of expertise and considerable variability, even within groups, were observed in the collected data. Reducing variability and supporting the tracking task in the administration of anesthesia could lead to improved patient outcomes.

Drug Delivery as Control Task: Improving Performance in a Common Anesthetic Task

“…Unfortunately, the complex pharmacokineticpharmacodynamic models are poorly understood by clinicians (Picciano, Drews, Syroid, & Westenskow, 2003) and are not available for clinical practice because of their complexity. Without the aid of computer simulation or computer-controlled drug delivery, it is very difficult to optimize the dosage of a drug (Dowd, Cheng, & Karski, 1998;Sandin et al, 2002).…”