[Blood pressure control in the area of surgical interventions]

For specific surgical interventions, such as aortic stent implantation, it might be temporarily necessary to decrease mean arterial pressure to rather low levels (around 40 mm Hg). Such hypotensive pressure levels are necessary to avoid intra- and postoperative intricacies. Traditionally, the drug Nitroprussidnatrium is used for this task. To adjust the correct amount of drug to reach the target pressure as fast as possible and without overshoot, the anaesthetists typically use empirical knowledge and might need several minutes until the target point is reached. In our research group, an adaptive control system was developed for this task which is able to compute and set the transient drug release automatically. For the design and testing of the adaptive control strategy, the well known Guyton model was implemented into the MATLAB/Simulink development environment. This paper describes the implementation and adaption of the Guyton model to hypotensive pressure control and provides some algorithmic details of the adaptive control strategy for automatic drug delivery in deep hypotension. The designed control system was successfully validated in animal trials (25 trials on 7 pigs). Following this, an additional controller component for increase of blood pressure with the help of the drug Noradrenalin was implemented. It is now possible to increase blood pressure to a specific value to save defined cerebral perfusion pressure for patients with craniocerebral injury. In a second pilot trial, this controller extension was tested in 10 pigs.