EEG Signal Processing for Monitoring Depth of Anesthesia

摘要

Among the various functional organ systems within the human body, the central nervous system (CNS) is affected maximum by anesthetic drug. Since electroencephalography (EEG) is a phenomenon of cerebral cortex, this signal is the best indicator of anesthesia. The raw EEG signal recorded from the patient in the operation theatre has many undesirable constituents or artifacts which don't allow it to be used directly for predicting the depth of anesthesia. These artifacts include scalp muscle interferences, presence of power line frequency carrier, electrocardiographic (ECG) and eye-blinking effects. This paper describes the methods used to remove these artifacts and enumerates various parameters of EEG signal which undergo significant changes with anesthetic dose. Data processing of 'clean' EEG signal may be carried out using statistical methods to extract those EEG parameters which discriminate maximum between awake and anesthetized states of human patients.