Quantitative EEG assessment

Novel Burst Suppression Segmentation in the Joint Time-Frequency Domain for EEG in Treatment of Status Epilepticus

We developed a method to distinguish bursts and suppressions for EEG burst suppression from the treatments of status epilepticus, employing the joint time-frequency domain. We obtained the feature used in the proposed method from the joint use of the time and frequency domains, and we estimated the decision as to whether the measured EEG was a burst segment or suppression segment by the maximum likelihood estimation. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method in terms of its accordance with the visual scores and estimation of the burst suppression ratio. The accuracy was higher than the sole use of the time or frequency domains, as well as conventional methods conducted in the time domain. In addition, probabilistic modeling provided a more simplified optimization than conventional methods. Burst suppression quantification necessitated precise burst suppression segmentation with an easy optimization; therefore, the excellent discrimination and the easy optimization of burst suppression by the proposed method appear to be beneficial.

A survey on application of quantitative methods on analysis of brain parameters changing with temperature

Brain temperature fluctuations occur in consequence of physiological and pathophysiological conditions and indicate changes in brain metabolism, cerebral blood flow (CBF), brain functions and neural damage. Lowering the brain temperature of patients with traumatic brain injuries achieves considerable improvements. When the human brain is cooled down to 30°C, it switches to a sub functional regime where it can live longer with less oxygen, glucose and other supplies. Fluctuations in brain temperature cause changes in brain parameters which can be measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) and transcranial Doppler (TCD). It is very important to understand the temperature dependencies of brain's electrical activity and blood flow and their interrelations considering the good clinical results achieved by lowering the brain temperature of neurologically injured patients. Since protecting the patient's brain is of primary importance in many fields including cardiology, neurology, traumatology and anesthesia it can be clearly seen that this subject is very important. In this study, we survey the "state-of-the-art" in analysis of EEG and TCD brain parameters changing with temperature and present further research opportunities.

A subband-based information measure of EEG during brain injury and recovery after cardiac arrest

We propose an improved quantitative measure of EEG during brain injury and recovery after cardiac arrest. In our previous studies, we proposed a measure, information quantity (IQ), to detect the early effects of temperature manipulation on the EEG signals recorded from the scalp. IQ incorporates the wavelet transform and the Shannon entropy in full bands from delta to gamma. Unlike IQ, here we separately calculate IQ in each subband, i.e., the new measure is IQ in each subband. We will call it subband IQ (SIQ). We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method by comparing SIQ with IQ in terms of how well the meausres predict actual neurological outcomes. Thirteen rats, based on 7-min cardiac arrest were used. The experimental results show that the proposed measure was more highly correlated to neurological outcome than IQ.