Best practice & research. Clinical anaesthesiology
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Blood glucose control performed by intensive care unit (ICU) nurses is becoming standard practice for critically ill patients. New algorithms, ranging from basic protocols to elementary computerized protocols to advanced computerized protocols, have been presented during the last years aiming to reduce the workload of the medical team. ⋯ Particularly advanced computerized protocols can potentially be introduced as fully-automated blood glucose algorithms when accurate and reliable near-continuous glucose sensor devices are available. Furthermore, it is surprising to consider in some of the described protocols that the original blood glucose target ranges (80-110 mg/dl) were increased (due to fear of hypoglycaemia) and/or that glycaemia levels were determined in capillary blood samples.
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Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol · Mar 2009
ReviewMachine learning techniques to examine large patient databases.
Computerization in healthcare in general, and in the operating room (OR) and intensive care unit (ICU) in particular, is on the rise. This leads to large patient databases, with specific properties. ⋯ Although the number of potential applications for these techniques in medicine is large, few medical doctors are familiar with their methodology, advantages and pitfalls. A general overview of machine learning techniques, with a more detailed discussion of some of these algorithms, is presented in this review.
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Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol · Mar 2009
ReviewImpact of computerized information systems on workload in operating room and intensive care unit.
The number of operating rooms and intensive care departments equipped with a clinical information system (CIS) is rapidly expanding. Amongst the putative advantages of such an installation, reduction in workload for the clinician is one of the most appealing. ⋯ The hypothesis that a third generation CIS can reduce documentation time for ICU nurses and increase time they spend on patient care, is supported by recent literature. Though it seems obvious to extrapolate these advantages of a CIS to the anesthesiology department or physicians in the intensive care, studies examining this assumption are scarce.
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Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol · Mar 2009
ReviewClosed-loop control for intensive care unit sedation.
The potential clinical applications of active control for pharmacology in general, and anesthesia and critical care unit medicine in particular, are clearly apparent. Specifically, monitoring and controlling the depth of anesthesia in surgery and the intensive care unit is of particular importance. Nonnegative and compartmental models provide a broad framework for biological and physiological systems, including clinical pharmacology, and are well suited for developing models for closed-loop control for drug administration. ⋯ Closed-loop control based on appropriate dynamical systems models merits investigation as a means of improving drug delivery in the intensive care unit. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of feedback control using nonnegative and compartmental system theory for the specific problem of closed-loop control of intensive care unit sedation. Several closed-loop control paradigms are investigated including adaptive control, neural network adaptive control, optimal control, and hybrid adaptive control algorithms for intensive care unit sedation.