Closed-loop administration of analgesic drugs based on heart rate variability analysis.

General anesthesia is based on the use of hypnotic, muscle relaxant and analgesic drugs in order to render the patient unresponsive to the surgical procedure. The difficulty for anesthesiologists is then to determinate the minimum efficient dose to avoid any risk of under or over dosing. For several years, monitoring systems were developed in order to measure depth of hypnosis, myorelaxation and analgesia.

Ambulatory pain evaluation based on heart rate variability analysis: Application to physical therapy.

Pain assessment is critical for efficient pain management. Clinicians usually use self-report or behavioral pain scales. In practice, the choice of the most adaptive scale depends on several parameters like the clinical context, the patient consciousness or its age, but all evaluation scales are known to be more or less subjective and to present high inter and intra individual variability.

Variations of the analgesia nociception index during propofol anesthesia for total knee replacement.

Objective: The Analgesia Nociception Index (ANI) monitor measures the relative parasympathetic tone as a surrogate for the antinociception/nociception balance during general anesthesia. The aims of this observational study were to test whether ANI could early detect hemodynamic reactivity (HemodR) during propofol anesthesia, measure pain in conscious patients after surgery, and determine ANI predictive thresholds.

Materials And Methods: After institutional approval and informed consent, adult patients scheduled for total knee replacement were included.

Automated analgesic drugs delivery guided by vagal tone evaluation: interest of the Analgesia Nociception Index (ANI).

Analgesic drugs delivery optimization constitutes one of the main objectives of modern anesthesia. Indeed, their over or under determination constitutes a risk for anesthetized patient in terms of hemodynamic reactivity or post-operative hyperalgesia. Nowadays, new physiological indexes allow anesthesiologists to evaluate the balance between the analgesia level and the noxious stimulus importance.

Heart rate variability analysis for arterial hypertension etiological diagnosis during surgical procedures under tourniquet.

Pneumatic tourniquets are widely used to provide a bloodless operative field during upper or lower limb surgery. If tourniquet inflation during general anesthesia is initially a mild stimulus, a long duration of inflation can imply heart rate and blood pressure increasing. However, heart rate or blood pressure increasing can also be caused by other external stimuli.