Depth of anaesthesia monitoring: what's available, what's validated and what's next?

Depth of anaesthesia monitors might help to individualize anaesthesia by permitting accurate drug administration against the measured state of arousal of the patient. In addition, the avoidance of awareness or excessive anaesthetic depth might result in improved patient outcomes. Various depth of anaesthesia monitors based on processed analysis of the EEG or mid-latency auditory-evoked potentials are commercially available as surrogate measures of anaesthetic drug effect. However, not all of them are validated to the same extent.