Journal of Biomedical Systems & Emerging Technologies

This paper studies an appropriate pharmacokinetic (PK) model for hypnosis control based on effect-site anesthetic concentration. For maintaining hypnosis, methods to keep plasma or effect-site concentration of propofol, an anesthetic drug, calculated using PK models at a target level are often used. In order to realize a desirable hypnosis control by such methods an accurate estimation of propofol concentration corresponding to the threshold of unconsciousness is critical. Since time variation of the calculated propofol concentration depends on the PK model, the performance of maintaining hypnosis also depends on it. In this paper, we compare the existing PK models of propofol focusing on sensitivity and specificity for detecting consciousness during anesthesia by a criterion based on cal ulated propofol concentration and measured aepEX, a hypnosis index. The results show that Barr model provides the highest sensitivity and specificity, and that Marsh, modified Marsh, and Schnider models, which are often used in target controlled infusion systems give fairly high sensitivity and specificity.

Fatal accidents can occur when workers do not use insulating safeguards to prevent electric shocks.Many of these accidents are caused by contact with low and high voltage objects. These accidents may not be entirely eliminated through the use of insulating safeguards. Workers often fail to use msafeguards because they are difficult to use in tight work situation. Therefore, a more suitable insulating safeguard is required to prevent these accidents. We study the design of an insulating safeguard based on theDC breakdown voltages of two insulating materials (a PMMA plate and an insulating sheet of EVA). The breakdown voltage of the insulating sheet exhibits the polarity effect though the characteristics of the PMMA plate are slightly dependent of the polarity of the applied voltage. The results of this study will be useful in the basic design of insulating safeguards.

Diabetes mellitus is a disease of the endocrine system in which blood glucose levels are constantly above the normal range. Since insulin-dependent diabetic patients require insulin administration to maintain blood glucose levels within the normal range, automatic blood glucose control methods to reduce the burden of such open-loop insulin therapy have been studied. In this review, we first introduce some important mathematical models of glucoseinsulin metabolism, followed by some representative blood glucose control systems, where most of them use model predictive control as control algorithm, developed to date and discuss their implications in the near future.

The prevalence of MIS robotic technology has increased in such a way, both in the social, health and economic aspects, that it is extremely important to have valid and generally accepted ways to measure the complexity of the very diverse technologies. In the beginning of the second decade of this XXI century, we are experiencing a new technological revolution in the way surgery is offered all around the world. We can say that we are probably living in the beginning of the Third generation of MIS technology where functionality and security are no longer the predominant criteria to qualify a new robotic system for medical use. We are seeing since the end of the 2000’s how new projects are trying to justify the change between the current haptic approach of multi-input Multi-output robust static out vivo machines with various actuators, each one with many degrees of freedom, to a new approach using a network of many mini-robots with few actuators. It is strongly necessary to develop measures of comparison of the different MIS robotic systems in terms of functional, structural, sensing, intelligence, interface, and dynamic task, environmental and power complexity, applicable to any machine system. A complexity comparison study of this kind, must involve a way to determine levels of complexity that can be computed from design parameters of any robot. This qualitative study aims to fill the gap that is the lack of objective measures of complexity used to describe features of these machines.