Individualized PID tuning for maintenance of general anesthesia with propofol

In this paper we investigate a novel tuning methodology for a patient-individualized selection of the parameters of a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller that regulates the maintenance phase of general anesthesia. In particular, the knowledge of demographic data is exploited to determine the values of the parameters for each specific patient. The proposed approach is focused on the closed-loop administration of propofol by using the Bispectral Index Scale as controlled variable. Simulation results suggest that, with respect to a previously devised population-based PID tuning approach, the new methodology is more robust with respect to both intra-patient and inter-patient variability, at the cost of a slight decrement in the controller bandwidth.