Automated estimation of sedation depth from the EEG.

A method is presented for the automatic determination of a patient's level of sedation from the EEG. Six bipolar channels of EEG recorded from 12 adult patients sedated with low-dose propofol (2, 6-disopropylphenol) were used to develop a linear discriminant based system for depth of sedation monitoring using a number of quantitative EEG measures. A cross fold validation estimate of the performance of the algorithm as a patient independent system yielded a sensitivity of 74.70% and a specificity of 81.67%. It is hoped that the methodology reported here could lead to fully automated systems for depth of sedation monitoring.