Use of long catheters for multipatient anesthetic monitoring at high respiratory frequencies.

Anesthetic gases from several patients can be monitored simultaneously with a centrally located mass spectrometer. Such monitoring requires catheters from patient to spectrometer that are several meters long. Scamman (J Clin Monit 1988; 4:227-229) found that when the respiratory frequency is high, as with infants, the CO2 signal from the patient is unacceptably distorted during passage down the catheter. This is due to Taylor dispersion of the input signal. An outline of the theory of Taylor dispersion is given. The equations describe the interaction between the velocity distribution (which, in laminar flow, is parabolic) and the radial diffusion of CO2. This interaction keeps a tracer signal together in a pulse, as it moves down the tube with the mean velocity, spreading somewhat as it proceeds. How much does an initially sharp signal become blurred? The spread of such a signal when it reaches the detector, measured in time, can be expressed in various ways. Measurement is complicated, however, by the fact that the gas pressure may fall by as much as a factor of 10 along the line. The resultant expansion and acceleration of the gas cannot be ignored. A full treatment of this complication is given elsewhere, but the following simple equation is described: delta t = 3.54 x 10(-3) l [(1 + R2)/(1 - R2)]1/2. Typically, the spread time is up to a quarter of a second for catheters of 50 m, such as used by Scamman. This is comparable with the period of CO2 rise and fall for infants and explains the serious distortion in wave form that Scamman+ found.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)