Improving Technologies in Anesthesia

General anesthesia is well known to offer physicians access to a broad variety of invasive procedures otherwise deemed too risky. Anesthesia machines provides the means for anesthetizing patients safely in the hospital operating room. However, these devices are increasingly unable to meet the demands and needs outside of the hospital. Developing countries struggle to purchase and maintain these costly devices, leading to a 40-fold increase in anesthesia-related deaths compared to developed countries. Small-office practices in the United States experience significantly poorer anesthesia outcomes and increased legal claims versus their larger hospital counterparts, resulting in 60% more anesthesia-related deaths. Environmental impacts and global health concerns from the emitted anesthetic gases have brought into serious question the prevailing notion that unchecked emissions were sustainable. These factors can all be attributed to anesthesia machine design and technology having the primary intended use in the traditional operating room. The long-term goal of this work is to develop technologies in anesthesia that expand its safe use, decrease underlying costs, and reduce the total emissions. The immediate objective of this work is to create a feedback-controlled anesthetic gas vaporizer-scavenger system and evaluate its performance. The central hypothesis is that the combined use of mesoporous materials and feedback control provide the opportunity for repeatable capture and release of expired anesthetic gases during anesthesia delivery. Our rationale is that such a device will help reduce the amount of anesthetic needed while simultaneously offering improved control over the delivery of anesthetic gases