A FLC based decision support system for body fluid balancing in a major surgery

Fluid and electrolyte balancing in the human body is an important issue, especially for patients in the Intensive Care Unit or under long surgical operation. Fluid excess would evoke heart failure while fluid deficit would cause dehydration. Currently there is no precise analytical relationship for fluid administration. The development of a decision support system (DSS) assisting the anaesthetist to accurately estimate the patient´s body fluid during a major surgery is studied. Fuzzy logic control (FLC) is the main method employed in the inference engine of the DSS to estimate the fluid losses and manage the fluid balancing. The development of the DSS, the progress made so far and results obtained are presented