Anesthetic Machine – Anesthetic Systems

00:06 Hello ladies and gentlemen. This lecture in our ongoing series of lectures on Anesthesiology, is going to focus on Anesthesia Systems, the very important topic of Airway Management, and then briefly, on Monitoring and Anesthesia.

00:24 So, we're going to talk a little bit about the Anesthetic Machine. We're going to talk about the Partial Rebreathing System, which is the standard by which most of us function nowadays. We're going to talk about the Difficult Airway, which I've had many sleepless nights worrying about this, and I know nearly all my colleagues have as well. And we're going to talk about Standards of Monitoring for the Anesthesia Patient.

00:48 So we've gone from a very simple process of dropping ether on to what was called a Schimmelbusch Mask and allowing it to vaporize as the patient breathed through the mask, to very sophisticated systems that are microprocessor based and are highly developed to primarily deliver safe amounts of anesthetic in an effective fashion. So this is the modern anesthetic machine. As you can see, it's a very complicated piece of equipment. Some people compare anesthesia to piloting a plane. This is our cockpit.

01:30 In the anesthesia machine there are many valves, there's many pipes. There's a high pressure gas system, there's a low pressure gas system. There are vaporizers. There are monitors, as you can see on the device, and on the right hand, on the pole that comes off the right hand side of the device, you can see infusion pumps. Down on the lower part of the device, where you can see pipes and the greenish colored bag, that's the circle system, and that's really what's responsible for our way of delivering anesthetics. There's many safety features built into an anesthetic machine, not the least of which is that, it must be serviced at least annually. And the vapours are separately calibrated annually. The monitors have become part of the machine now. They used to be on separate poles, separate from the machine, and now they're really built into the machine.

02:30 And when we buy an anesthetic machine, we nearly always buy new monitors at the same time.