Interactive knowledge-based anaesthetic drug infusion systems

Abstract

Anaesthesia regarded from the aspect of drug therapy has a number of particularities as compared to other medical specialties, to these belong: duration of therapy is confined from a few minutes to a couple of hours the effects and side effects of the drugs used are potentially lethal the conscious response of the patient to drug delivery is not available As a consequence of these particularities it appears natural that a dosing strategy which requires a time-consuming careful titration of drug dose to drug effect is obsolete. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.