Software


Detailed description of the open source patient simulator

Citation disclaimer: If you use this simulator please cite the paper bellow

C. M. Ionescu, M. Neckebroek, M. Ghita and D. Copot, An Open Source Patient Simulator for Design and Evaluation of Computer Based Multiple Drug Dosing Control for Anesthetic and Hemodynamic Variables,

IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 8680-8694, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3049880.



The patient simulator platform is designed through an interdisciplinary combination of medical, clinical practice and systems engineering expertise gathered in the last decades by our team. The result is an open source patient simulator in Matlab/Simulink from Mathworks(R). Simulator features include complex synergic and antagonistic interaction aspects between general anesthesia and hemodynamic stabilization variables. The anesthetic system includes the hypnosis, analgesia and neuromuscular blockade states, while the hemodynamic system includes the cardiac output and mean arterial pressure. Nociceptor stimulation is also described and acts as a disturbance together with predefined surgery profiles from a translation into signal form of most commonly encountered events in clinical practice. A broad population set of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic (PKPD) variables are available for the user to describe both intra- and inter-patient variability. This simulator has some unique features, such as:

  • Additional bolus administration from anesthesiologist.
  • Variable time-delays introduced by data window averaging when poor signal quality is detected.
  • Drug trapping from heterogeneous tissue diffusion in high body mass index patients.
Our work is uniquely defined in current state of the art and first of its kind for this application of dose management problem in anesthesia. This simulator provides the research community with accessible tools to allow a systematic design, evaluation and comparison of various control algorithms for multi-drug dosing optimization objectives in anesthesia.