Advances in anesthesia monitoring

Technological advances in monitoring for anesthesia continue to provide clinicians with an increasing amount of physiologic information for critical intraoperative decision making. This expanded set of physiologic data not only makes routine surgery safer from rare, but potentially fatal, anesthetic or surgical mishaps; it also facilitates surgery on very high risk patients. However, it must be emphasized at the onset that anesthesia monitoring is probably more appropriately termed perioperative or critical care monitoring, since many of these advances are applicable in the critical care units as well.