Guiding Drug Titration During Procedural Sedation
Procedural sedation uses drugs such as propofol to relieve pain and anxiety associated with medical procedures performed outside the operating room. There is currently no objective measure of sedation level to guide the titration of medications leading to the risk of under- or over-sedation. This research will use pharmacokinetic models to estimate the time course of the sedation agent in the body to provide more objective markers of sedation from a database containing information from procedural sedations conducted at two collaborating hospitals. We will also develop a tool to guide the physician in real-time that displays the estimated sedation state and recommends how much additional sedation agent to administer and when based on the anticipated remaining duration of the procedure.

Signals and systems is my favorite field in electrical engineering. As for the human body and medication I have always considered them a mystery. I am fascinated to explore the possibilities of modeling the human body as a system we can control and predict.