Continuous monitoring of propofol in human serum with fouling compensation by support vector classifier

We present a new method for electrochemical sensing, which compensates the fouling effect of propofol through machine learning (ML) model. Direct and continuous monitoring of propofol is crucial in the development of automatic systems for control of drug infusion in anaesthesiology. The fouling effect on electrodes discourages the possibility of continuous online monitoring of propofol since polymerization of the surface produces sensor drift. Several approaches have been proposed to limit the phenomenon at the biochemical interface; instead, here, we present a novel ML-based calibration procedure. In this paper, we analyze a dataset of 600 samples acquired through staircase cyclic voltammetry (SCV), resembling the scenario of continuous monitoring of propofol, both in PBS and in undiluted human serum, to demonstrate that ML-based model solves electrode fouling of anaesthetics. The proposed calibration approach is based on Gaussian radial basis function support vector classifier (RBF-SVC) that achieves classification accuracy of 98.9 % in PBS, and 100 % in undiluted human serum. The results prove the ability of the ML-based model to correctly classify propofol concentration in the therapeutic range between 1 µM and 60 µM with levels of 10 µM, continuously up to ten minutes, with one sample every 30 s.