This conference comes near the end of a major European interdisciplinary investigation of the nonlinear dynamics of anaesthesia - the BRACCIA project - which links research groups in Lancaster, Lausanne, Ljubljana, Oslo, Potsdam and Prague.

The objectives of BRACCIA are to complete the basic research that may be useful in the future for assessing depth of anaesthesia. BRACCIA has addressed the following problems -

*Tools for measuring variability of cardiovascular and neuronal oscillations.
*Theory of extraction of phase dynamics of spatio-temporal oscillations.
*Numerical algorithms for detection of synchronization and couplings.
*Cardiorespiratory synchronization and the direction of interactions.
*Interactions among and between brain waves and cardiovascular oscillations.
*Assessment of the depth of anaesthesia during spontaneous and assisted respiration in rats and humans.
*Assessments of the effects of different anaesthetics on cardio-respiratory-brain phase dynamics.
*Modelling cardio-respiratory-brain phase dynamics.

The aim of the conference is to bring together the results of all these investigations for discussion between members of the consortium and international experts in cardiovascular and brain dynamics, complex systems and the theory of nonlinear, stochastic and phase dynamics. The meeting is intended to bridge the biomedical and physical sciences.