Anesthesia and analgesia
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The global volume of surgery is increasing. Adverse outcomes after surgery have resource implications and long-term impact on quality of life and consequently represent a significant and underappreciated public health issue. ⋯ The association between short- and long-term outcomes, which persists when corrected for base-line risk, has significant implications for patients and providers and warrants further investigation. Candidate mechanisms include sustained inflammation and reduced physician activity, which may, in the future, be mitigated by targeted interventions.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Apr 2023
Randomized Controlled TrialNociception Level Index-Guided Intraoperative Analgesia for Improved Postoperative Recovery: A Randomized Trial.
Nociception is the physiological response to nociceptive stimuli, normally experienced as pain. During general anesthesia, patients experience and respond to nociceptive stimuli by increasing blood pressure and heart rate if not controlled by preemptive analgesia. The PMD-200 system from Medasense (Ramat Gan, Israel) evaluates the balance between nociceptive stimuli and analgesia during general anesthesia and generates the nociception level (NOL) index from a single finger probe. NOL is a unitless index ranging from 0 to 100, with values exceeding 25 indicating that nociception exceeds analgesia. We aimed to demonstrate that titrating intraoperative opioid administration to keep NOL <25 optimizes intraoperative opioid dosing. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that pain scores during the initial 60 minutes of recovery are lower in patients managed with NOL-guided fentanyl than in patients given fentanyl per clinical routine. ⋯ More intraoperative fentanyl was given in NOL-guided patients, but NOL guidance did not reduce initial postoperative pain scores.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Apr 2023
Digitization of Symbol-Denoted Blood Pressure Data From Intraoperative Paper Health Records in a Low-Middle-Income Country Using Deep Image Segmentation and Associated Postoperative Outcomes: A Feasibility Study.
In low-middle-income countries (LMICs), perioperative clinical information is almost universally collected on paper health records (PHRs). The lack of accessible digital databases limits LMICs in leveraging data to predict and improve patient outcomes after surgery. In this feasibility study, our aims were to: (1) determine the detection performance and prediction error of the U-Net deep image segmentation approach for digitization of hand-drawn blood pressure symbols from an image of the intraoperative PHRs and (2) evaluate the association between deep image segmentation-derived blood pressure parameters and postoperative mortality and length of stay. ⋯ In this study, we report our experience with a deep image segmentation model for digitization of symbol-denoted blood pressure from intraoperative anesthesia PHRs. Our data support further development of this novel approach to digitize PHRs from LMICs, to provide accessible, curated, and reproducible data for both quality improvement- and outcome-based research.