Title: "Depth of anaesthesia monitoring in the elderly using spontaneous and evoked EEG"



Abstract:

Depth of anaesthesia monitoring provides a safeguard against intra-operative awareness as well as anaesthetic overdose. Anaesthesia in the elderly becomes a greater risk due to increased occurrence of coexisting disease and increased effect of anaesthetic agents. The EEG changes with age, and as such it is hypothesised that there would be an individual combination of EEG parameters that predict conscious state during anaesthesia in the elderly, compared to that of younger adults. This biomedical engineering project involves the development of a new depth of anaesthesia algorithm that will have high responsiveness and uniform sensitivity across age groups and different anaesthetic agents. It involves the collection and analysis of data to define an appropriate combination of both spontaneous and evoked EEG parameters to predict conscious state in the elderly.