Holographic anesthesia lifeguard

Address correspondence to Dr Westenskow, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. Holographic anesthesia lifeguard (HAL) is this team's vision of the anesthesia workstation of the future. The assumptions behind HAL are summarized in Table t. HAL is designed using 1996 technology; it will be introduced to the anesthesia market in the year 2001. Projected sales cost is $100,000. This anesthesia workstation represents a total paradigm shift. It is unlike any machine previously seen--in fact, the anesthesia machine itself does not exist. The features of HAL are listed in Table 2 and are displayed in Figure 1. Patient data are displayed using a virtualreality projection and three-dimensional sound. Input includes both gestures and voice (natural language). The required mechanical components for gas and drug delivery are hidden in the pedestal of the operating room table. The machine's intelligence resides in an adaptive clinical intent inference engine, loaded preoperatively with a priori information from the data transfer module, which the user carried into the operating room. The engine includes a hyperpatient model (neuralnetwork-based), which tracks the patient and predicts the future (Table 3). The benefits of this workstation are listed in Table 4. The pedestal, upon which the operafng room table rests, contains drugs, fluids, and blood. These are loaded into drawers and are delivered automatically, under computer control (Fig 2). Gases are also delivered from the pedestal, through automatically controlled devices that are fail-safe because of built-in redundancy. Sensors for flow" and pressure are found throughout the system. Gas reservoir tanks are placed outside the operating room, for security. Devices in the pedestal collect urine and salvage blood. The system automatically switches between two liquid absorbers, with minimal dead space, to scrub carbon dioxide and reclaim anesthesia agent from the breathing circuit. A dual Raman spectrometer monitors gases from the patient and the machine. An opaque writing surface, which normally displays the anesthetic record, becomes transparent when electric power fails, so the clinician can view the LEDs from battery-powered monitors. The human interface of HAL uses cockpit technology developed for the Air Force. Supercockpit technology currently translates information from 300 switches and 75 displays into a single picture. The picture integrates the information, making its complexity transparent, so that the pilot can see all information in an intuitive form. The pilot can perceive a gestalt because of the