Operations Could Be Using McSleepy In The Future

Montreal scientists from McGill University think they are the first in the world to use an automated system for general anesthetic dug administration. McSleepy feeds a patient three separate standard drugs to produce sleep during an operation and monitors the patients response to each of their effects without the need for manual intervention. Researchers claim their device can do a better job at dispensing the medications to a patient and monitoring the effects than a human. It is even able to recognize monitoring malfunctions.

Don’t worry though that anesthesiologists will be out of a job.

“Automatic systems in life only help us to perform our task better, they will not replace us,” principal developer Dr. Thomas Hemmerling said Thursday.

“The majority of our work is actually how we … manage everything that goes on with surgery. Bleeding, temperature control, all these kind of things should be much more important to us than just applying the drugs to make somebody sleepy, because that’s how we help the surgeons to do their job.”

“So if you have an automatic system covering the mere administration of these drugs, we can really focus on what else we’re doing.”

Best described McSleepy is a software program that oversees the infusion pumps in a patient’s veins during an operation. It works with the drugs that are designed to induce sleep, control pain and relax muscles which is needed for standard operations. The software is also able to give doctors precise measurements of how the patient is responding to those drugs throughout the operation by reading brainwave patterns, muscle contractions, heart rate and blood pressure readings. Dr. Shane Sheppard, president of the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society sees McSleepy would be especially useful for long operations where doctors have to administer certain drugs at variously timed intervals.

While this type of machine could prove invaluable during surgeries doctors are still needed to oversee the process and in the case of a malfunction. If the machine has a problem the device is equip with an override option.

McSleepy could be in operating rooms within five years. McGill is working with biomedical engineers at Universite de Montreal to complete the project.

The researchers will have to use McSleepy on 1,000 to 2,000 surgical patients before they can seek to obtain approval from Health Canada or the FDA.

“It will probably take two years to perfect the system,” Hemmerling said.

“McSleepy is born but it needs a lot of work.”

Source: By Moments in Time