Steady state condition--what does it mean during investigation of oxygen supply?

Judging from the presented data it was possible to maintain steady state conditions during high dose piritramide anesthesia for a period of three and a half hours. Under these carefully defined experimental conditions it will be possible to actually correlate any changes observed in the microcirculatory bed with medication or other interventions. So-called "normal Po2 histograms" taken from different organs of dogs under the above-defined experimental conditions (basic anesthesia with high-dose piritramide, controlled artificial ventilation with 21% O2) are presented in Fig. 12. We feel that any comparison of results from different working groups must be based on exactly defined and standardized experimental conditions, because otherwise the methodological differences would prevent adequate comparability.