In this paper, a cepstral analysis based approach to measuring the depth of anesthesia (DoA) is presented. Cepstral analysis is a signal processing technique widely used especially for speech recognition in order to extract speech information regardless of vocal cord characteristics. The resulting index for the DoA is called index based on cepstral analysis (ICep). The Fisher criterion is engaged to evaluate the performance of indices. All analyses are based on a single-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) of 10 human subjects. To validate the proposed technique, ICep is compared with bispectral index (BIS), which is the most commonly used method to estimate the level of consciousness via EEG during general anesthesia. The results show that ICep has high correlation with BIS, and is outstanding in terms of the Fisher criterion and offers faster tracking than BIS in the transition from consciousness to unconsciousness.