Anesthetic agent recovery

Abstract

Disclosed and claimed herein are devices and method for the recovery of one or more anesthetic agents after they have been exhaled from a patient undergoing surgery and before they have been vented to the atmosphere. Typical anesthetic agents include, but are not limited to, isoflurane, desflurane, sevoflurane, and the like. Recovery of the anesthetic agents should result in numerous benefits including, but not limited to, reduction of their production costs, protection of the environment, and the like.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 537,550, filed Jan. 20, 2004.FIELD [0002] The devices and methods disclosed and claimed herein are related to the field of medicine, in particular anesthesia. Specifically, the devices and methods are related to the recovery of anesthetic agents from a waste gas stream. DESCRIPTION OF THE RELATED ART [0003] As used herein anesthetic agents comprise compounds with anesthetic properties that are supplied in liquid form, but are administered to patients in need of anesthesia primarily in the gaseous state. Specifically, the methods and devices disclosed and claimed herein are for the recovery of volatile, organic, potent, inhalational anesthetic agents (VOPIAA). Such agents are typically supplied in liquid form to physicians and / or veterinarians. The agents are then poured into vaporizers on an anesthetic machine in the operating room (OR) and / or other location of u...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0035] recovering the one or more anesthetic agent.

[0036] Furthermore, in this aspect, the one or more anesthetic agent is a potent, inhalational anesthetic agent. Also, the one or more anesthetic agent is selected from the group consisting of isoflurane, desflurane, and sevoflurane. The condensing step is accomplished in a cooled chamber. The chamber is cooled by a process selected from the group consisting of heat exchange methods and compression/re-expansion techniques. The one or more recovered anesthetic agent is recycled an...

Problems solved by technology

A potential problem is that the synthetic process for producing fluorine-based anesthetic agents is both difficult and expensive.

Like ISOFLURANE and DESFLURANE, SEVOFLURANE is also difficult and expensive to produce.

Because of the cost of producing DESFLURANE and SEVOFLURANE, these agents were not considered viable products until the late 1980's, when outpatient surgery became a reality.

It has two potential downfalls, namely a saturated vapor pressure near one atmosphere (1.0 atm.) at room temperature, which precludes conventional vaporizer systems, and it is about ⅕th as potent as ISOFLURANE, which means that more must be used to achieve the same effect.

SEVOFLURANE has been shown to be unstable in the presence of standard CO2 absorbents (e.g., including, but not limited to, soda lime and baralime) despite the absence of chlorination.

In addition, metabolism of SEVOFLURANE (5%) produced inorganic fluoride which is potentially toxic to the renal system.

Because of the costs of development, and the absence of a need to change present anesthetic practice, it is unlikely that any new agents will be introduced for some time.

Furthermore, the difficulties and thus costs of production remain high.

To date, no devices and / or methods of the type disclosed herein for extracting volatile, organic, potent, inhalational anesthetic agents from waste anesthesia gas have been disclosed.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,914 to Eschwey et al. discloses a process and device for the “on-line recovery of xenon from anesthetic gas.” The Eschwey process and device are limited to the separation of xenon from a gas mixture.

As mentioned before, this cost is unlikely to drop in the future because of production and tort-related expenses.

If these numbers are extrapolated to the entire nation, and the volume of gas used, as well as gas wasted, becomes quite staggering.

This would result in a significant cost saving versus the cost of original synthesis.

Images