[Cerebral monitoring in anesthesia and intensive care]

To ensure efficient computer-based cerebral monitoring in the ICU and during anaesthesia, sophisticated and sometimes expensive equipment is needed. It is thus all the more important that the clinician should have a good understanding and knowledge of the various methods involved, the origins of the different signals and their relationships, and of the possibilities of artefacts occurring, if the information that this equipment is capable of providing is to be fully and properly utilized. The present paper describes a number of new techniques of cerebral monitoring, and their successful application in the intensive care unit and the operating theatre.