Objective. In this paper, a new approach of extracting and measuring the variability in electroencephalogram (EEG) was proposed to assess the depth of anesthesia (DOA) under general anesthesia.Approach. The EEG variability (EEGV) was extracted as a fluctuation in time interval that occurs between two local maxima of EEG. Eight parameters related to EEGV were measured in time and frequency domains, and compared with state-of-the-art DOA estimation parameters, including sample entropy, permutation entropy, median frequency and spectral edge frequency of EEG. The area under the receiver-operator characteristics curve (AUC) and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to validate its performance on 56 patients.Main results. Our proposed EEGV-derived parameters yield significant difference for discriminating between awake and anesthesia stages at a significance level of 0.05, as well as improvement in AUC and correlation coefficient on average, which surpasses the conventional features of EEG in detection accuracy of unconscious state and tracking the level of consciousness.Significance. To sum up, EEGV analysis provides a new perspective in quantifying EEG and corresponding parameters are powerful and promising for monitoring DOA under clinical situations.
Keywords: depth of anesthesia; electroencephalogram; general anesthesia; variability analysis.
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