Event-based surgical protocol digitalization for system identification and robust control in general anesthesia

Summary

The project designs and tests fractional-order control concepts on a full anesthesia–hemodynamic patient simulator. The simulator is extended with features that current benchmarks lack: variability across patient models, the effect of blood loss on time constants and steady-state values, and disturbance profiles specific to each type of surgery.

Existing patient databases and recorded surgical protocols are used to build a realistic simulation environment, in place of the fixed, assumed stimulation profiles common in the literature.

Objectives

• Digitalize surgical protocols into event sequences that can be used for system identification and controller validation.
• Extend the anesthesia–hemodynamic simulator with patient variability, blood-loss dynamics and surgery-specific disturbance profiles.
• Propose funnel-type output-limit interval guidance for the switch from induction (reference tracking) to maintenance (disturbance rejection).
• Validate the control strategies and study closed-loop stability on a 5×5 multivariable simulator.

Implementation phases

• Phase I — 2025. Completed. Results are summarised in the Phase I scientific report below.
• Phase II — 2026. In progress. The final report will be published here when the project ends.

Scientific reports

Related open outputs

• Measured surgical events dataset: 22,229 intraoperative events taken from VitalDB, with closed-loop benchmark results (Zenodo).

Publications

Publications from this project are listed on my Web of Science researcher profile.

This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-0831, within PNCDI IV.