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Section: Application Domains

General remarks

The research directions of the team are motivated by general anesthesia that has attracted our attention in the last years. The following paragraphs explain in some detail the motivation of our work on the four major phenomena of general anesthesia: loss of consciousness, immobility, amnesia and analgesia.

During general anesthesia, the electroencephalogram (EEG) on the scalp changes characteristically: increasing the anesthetic drug concentration the amplitudes of oscillations in the α-band (8-12Hz) and in the δ-band (2-8Hz) increase amplitudes in frontal electrodes at low drug concentrations whereas the spectral power decreases in the γ-band (20-60Hz). This characteristic change in the power is the basis of today’s EEG-monitors that assist the anesthetist in the control of the anesthesia depths of patients during surgery. However, the conventional monitors exhibit a large variability between the detected anesthetic depth and the real depth of patients. Moreover, a certain number of patients re-gain consciousness during surgery (about 1-2 out of 1000) and a large percentage of patients suffer from diverse after-effects, such as nausea or long-lasting cognitive impairments such as partial amnesia (from days to weeks). Since surgery under general anesthesia is part of a hospital’s everyday practice, a large number of patients suffer from these events every day. One reason for the lacking control of such disadvantageous effects is the dramatic lack of knowledge on what is going on in the brain during general anesthesia and a weak EEG-online monitoring system during anesthesia. Consequently, to improve the situation of patients during and after surgery and to develop improved anesthetic procedures or even drugs, research is necessary to learn more about the neural processes in the brain and develop new monitoring machines.