Way to predict who is likely to wake up during surgery

Srivas Chennu (Department of Clinical Neurosciences) discusses how doctors could use brain waves to help predict how patients will respond to general anaesthetics. Measuring certain kinds of brain activity may help doctors track and predict how patients will react to anaesthesia before going under for surgery, our research has found. Doctors currently have no perfectly reliable way of ensuring patients are adequately unconscious before an operation begins. Although rare, the uncertainty sometimes results in traumatic experiences of patients "waking up" during surgery. Using a technique that measures electrical impulses in the brain of those in various states of sedation, we discovered network "signatures" that can indicate when loss of consciousness will occur. Doctors can use similar techniques to accurately identify the concentration of drug needed for a patient to lose consciousness and maintain that loss throughout an operation. Everyone is different.