Speakers
Prof. Jamie SLEIGH
Professor of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care
Waikato Clinical School, The University of Auckland, Hamilton
New Zealand
Jamie Sleigh is Professor of Anaesthesiology at the Waikato Clinical Campus, of the University of Auckland, Hamilton, New Zealand. He grew up in Zimbabwe, and specialised in anaesthesia in the United Kingdom, before moving to New Zealand in 1988. He has practiced in both intensive care medicine and anaesthesia – at present has particular interests in anaesthesia for vascular surgery and neurosurgery. He has been active in research for more than 30 years, has published over 300 papers on a wide range of topics. His current research interests include: the practical use of EEG in anaesthesia and consciousness; EEG signal processing; the genetic basis for anaesthesia resistance; modelling of brain dynamics in anaesthesia; and the use of ketamine ester analogues for perioperative sedation and analgesia.
Conflicts of Interest
He is named on patents for an ester analogue of ketamine.
Because of its simplicity and non-invasiveness, the idea that the EEG can be used to guide anaesthesia titration is beguiling. Over the last 30 years a large number of ad hoc EEG indices of consciousness have been proposed. All have been shown to be deficient in important respects. In order to develop a more reliable future monitor of anaesthesia and consciousness, it is necessary to understand what aspects of brain function are necessary for the emergence of consciousness. We essentially need to ‘decode’ the language of the brain. Existing EEG monitors of anaesthesia have had modest success in heuristically linking changes in EEG amplitude over different frequencies to the behavioural responsiveness of the patient. However, there are significant classification failures with this approach. It is clear that the formation of the conscious state requires co-ordination of separated brain modules. Therefore, there is a lot of ongoing work looking at how the network connectivity within and between brain regions is altered by anaesthesia. Furthermore, it is also clear that consciousness requires a sufficient level of complexity in these dynamic interactions. So, various measures of brain functional complexity are also being investigated. This presentation briefly reviews some of this recent work.
