Hemodynamic Stabilization

Intensive care patients often rely on a combination of drug, fluid, and other therapies to achieve and maintain stable hemodynamics. This projects investigates how pharmacology, mathematical modeling, signal processing and closed-loop control can be combined to control hemodynamic entities such as blood pressure, heart rate, and vascular resistance, as well as related entities such as diuresis. The research relies on close inter-disciplinary collaboration between medical and control systems researchers. It is conducted in a systems engineering framework and comprises the development of both methods and dedicated equipment for clinical verification.

The aim of the project is to develop methods for hemodynamic stabilization of intensive care patients. It comprises closed-loop control of readily measurable signals, including heart rate, arterial and venous blood pressure. Furthermore, the project aims at optimizing hemodynamic parameters, which are not directly measurable, such as cardiac output and responsiveness to volume expansion.

The aim of the project is to develop a generic platform for closed-loop intravenous drug delivery. Apart from being used in research, such a platform can be adapted to a multitude och medical treatment scenaraios, foremost in intensive care, where it has the potential to increase the availability of specialized physicians.

The aim of the project is to provide physicians with an 'auto pilot' for hemodynamic stabilizatioin and optimization. The initially considered patient group are heart-beating braindead patients under intensive care (potential organ donors). Due to the complete loss of vasomotor center function, hormonal and fluid therapy is required to establish hemodynamic stability within this group.

We combine automatic control methods with medical insight, to develop closed-loop controlled therapies. Developed methods are implemented on our in-house developed control system comprising sensors for invasive blood pressure measurement, and urination rate, as well as syringe and volumetric infusion, pumps for closed-loop controlled intravenous drug and fluid administration.

The methods are pre-clinically evaluated in collaboration with the project partner Igelösa Life Science AB.