Tuning of a Predictive Control Scheme for Intravenous Anaesthesia Exploring Set of Fixed Ratios

This work addresses automatic control of total intravenous anaesthesia performed by exploiting a Model Predictive Control (MPC) technique. The analyzed control scenario considers simultaneous infusion of propofol and remifentanil to attain hypnotic and analgesic effects, respectively. As common in the clinical practice, a fixed ratio between these infused drugs is assumed. Such a ratio can be set by the anaesthesiologists according to the type of medical intervention and to their individual preferences. Thus, it is necessary to account for this aspect of clinical practice during the control system design stage. This is obtained through the use of a suitable MPC-based control architecture whose tuning parameters are adequately computed by taking into account the selected ratio. The methodology provided in this work first addresses the tuning for a fixed set of ratios. Subsequently, a generalization of the approach is provided to allow any ratio belonging to a defined range. The effectiveness of the presented solution is evaluated through a simulation study.