Real-time segmentation of burst suppression patterns in critical care EEG monitoring

• Monitoring the depth of EEG burst suppression is critical in caring for patients with certain neurological critical illnesses.
• We present an automated method for real-time segmentation of adult burst suppression ICU EEGs.
• Our method achieves expert-level automated real-time segmentation of burst suppression EEG data.

ObjectiveDevelop a real-time algorithm to automatically discriminate suppressions from non-suppressions (bursts) in electroencephalograms of critically ill adult patients.MethodsA real-time method for segmenting adult ICU EEG data into bursts and suppressions is presented based on thresholding local voltage variance. Results are validated against manual segmentations by two experienced human electroencephalographers. We compare inter-rater agreement between manual EEG segmentations by experts with inter-rater agreement between human vs automatic segmentations, and investigate the robustness of segmentation quality to variations in algorithm parameter settings. We further compare the results of using these segmentations as input for calculating the burst suppression probability (BSP), a continuous measure of depth-of-suppression.ResultsAutomated segmentation was comparable to manual segmentation, i.e. algorithm-vs-human agreement was comparable to human-vs-human agreement, as judged by comparing raw EEG segmentations or the derived BSP signals. Results were robust to modest variations in algorithm parameter settings.ConclusionsOur automated method satisfactorily segments burst suppression data across a wide range adult ICU EEG patterns. Performance is comparable to or exceeds that of manual segmentation by human electroencephalographers.SignificanceAutomated segmentation of burst suppression EEG patterns is an essential component of quantitative brain activity monitoring in critically ill and anesthetized adults. The segmentations produced by our algorithm provide a basis for accurate tracking of suppression depth.