Tracking Electroencephalographic Changes Using Distributions of Linear Models: Application to Propofol-Based Depth of Anesthesia Monitoring

Region-specific complexity of the intracranial EEG in the sleeping human brain

As the brain is a complex system with occurrence of self-similarity at different levels, a dedicated analysis of the complexity of brain signals is of interest to elucidate the functional role of various brain regions across the various stages of vigilance. We exploited intracranial electroencephalogram data from 38 cortical regions using the Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) as measure to assess brain complexity, on a dataset of 1772 electrode locations. HFD values depended on sleep stage and topography. HFD increased with higher levels of vigilance, being highest during wakefulness in the frontal lobe. HFD did not change from wake to stage N2 in temporo-occipital regions. The transverse temporal gyrus was the only area in which the HFD did not differ between any two vigilance stages. Interestingly, HFD of wakefulness and stage R were different mainly in the precentral gyrus, possibly reflecting motor inhibition in stage R. The fusiform and parahippocampal gyri were the only areas showing no difference between wakefulness and N2. Stages R and N2 were similar only for the postcentral gyrus. Topographical analysis of brain complexity revealed that sleep stages are clearly differentiated in fronto-central brain regions, but that temporo-occipital regions sleep differently.

Consciousness and complexity: a consilience of evidence

Over the last years, a surge of empirical studies converged on complexity-related measures as reliable markers of consciousness across many different conditions, such as sleep, anesthesia, hallucinatory states, coma, and related disorders. Most of these measures were independently proposed by researchers endorsing disparate frameworks and employing different methods and techniques. Since this body of evidence has not been systematically reviewed and coherently organized so far, this positive trend has remained somewhat below the radar. The aim of this paper is to make this consilience of evidence in the science of consciousness explicit. We start with a systematic assessment of the growing literature on complexity-related measures and identify their common denominator, tracing it back to core theoretical principles and predictions put forward more than 20 years ago. In doing this, we highlight a consistent trajectory spanning two decades of consciousness research and provide a provisional taxonomy of the present literature. Finally, we consider all of the above as a positive ground to approach new questions and devise future experiments that may help consolidate and further develop a promising field where empirical research on consciousness appears to have, so far, naturally converged.

Monitoring the level of hypnosis using a hierarchical SVM system

Monitoring level of hypnosis is a major ongoing challenge for anesthetists to reduce anesthetic drug consumption, avoiding intraoperative awareness and prolonged recovery. This paper proposes a novel automated method for accurate assessing of the level of hypnosis with sevoflurane in 17 patients using the electroencephalogram signal. In this method, a set of distinctive features and a hierarchical classification structure based on support vector machine (SVM) methods, is proposed to discriminate the four levels of anesthesia (awake, light, general and deep states). The first stage of the hierarchical SVM structure identifies the awake state by extracting Shannon Permutation Entropy, Detrended Fluctuation Analysis and frequency features. Then deep state is identified by extracting the sample entropy feature; and finally light and general states are identified by extracting the three mentioned features of the first step. The accuracy of the proposed method of analyzing the brain activity during anesthesia is 94.11%; which was better than previous studies and also a commercial monitoring system (Response Entropy Index).

Frontal-temporal functional connectivity of EEG signal by standardized permutation mutual information during anesthesia

Quantifying brain dynamics during anesthesia is an important challenge for understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms of anesthetic drug effect. Several single channel Electroencephalogram (EEG) indices have been proposed for monitoring anesthetic drug effect. The most commonly used single channel commercial index is the Bispectral index (BIS). However, this monitor has shown some drawbacks. In this study, a nonlinear functional connectivity measure named Standardized Permutation Mutual Information (SPMI) is proposed to describe communication between two-channel EEG signals at frontal and temporal brain regions during a controlled propofol-induced anesthesia and recovery design from eight subjects. The SPMI index has higher correlation with estimated propofol effect-site concentration and has better ability to distinguish three anesthetic states of patient than the other functional connectivity indexes (cross-correlation, coherence, phase analysis) and also the BIS index. Moreover, the SPMI index has a faster reaction to the effect of drug concentration, less variability at the consciousness state and better robustness to noise than BIS.

Automatic anesthesia depth staging using entropy measures and relative power of electroencephalogram frequency bands

Many of the surgeries performed under general anesthesia are aided by electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring. With increased focus on detecting the anesthesia states of patients in the course of surgery, more attention has been paid to analyzing the power spectra and entropy measures of EEG signal during anesthesia. In this paper, by using the relative power of EEG frequency bands and the EEG entropy measures, a new method for detecting the depth of anesthesia states has been presented based on the least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifiers. EEG signals were recorded from 20 patients before, during and after general anesthesia in the operating room at a sampling rate of 200 Hz. Then, 12 features were extracted from each EEG segment, 10 s in length, which are used for anesthesia state monitoring. No significant difference was observed (p > 0.05) between these features and the bispectral index (BIS), which is the commonly used measure of anesthetic effect. The used LS-SVM classifier based method is able to identify the anesthesia states with an accuracy of 80% with reference to the BIS index. Since the underlying equation of the utilized LS-SVM is linear, the computational time of the algorithm is not significant and therefore it can be used for online application in operation rooms.