Assessment of Cerebral Microvascular Circulation

One of the fundamental goals of anesthesia care is to optimize tissue perfusion and oxygenation, especially in critically ill patients. The standard monitors such as blood pressure, heart rate and pulse oximetry do not directly reflect tissue information and can be misleading sometimes. Coherent hemodynamics spectroscopy (CHS) based on cerebral oximetry is proposed as a continuous and non-invasive tool assessing cerebral microvascular hemodynamics. The investigators propose this study to explore the validity of CHS via comparison with transcranial Doppler measurement in anesthetized surgical patients. The hypotheses are: 1) CHS can effectively measure cerebral microvascular hemodynamic changes associated with mechanical ventilation adjustment during anesthesia. 2) CHS can assess functional status of cerebral autoregulation that is altered by hypercapnia and inhalational anesthetic agent.