Prediction of nociceptive responses during sedation by time-frequency representation

The level of sedation in patients undergoing medical procedures evolves continuously, such as the effect of the anesthetic and analgesic agents is counteracted by pain stimuli. The monitors of depth of anesthesia, based on the analysis of the electroencephalogram (EEG), have been progressively introduced into the daily practice to provide additional information about the state of the patient. However, the quantification of analgesia still remains an open problem. The purpose of this work is to analyze the capability of prediction of nociceptive responses based on the time-frequency representation (TFR) of EEG signal. Functions of spectral entropy, instantaneous power and instantaneous frequency were calculated in order to predict the presence or absence of the nociceptive responses to different stimuli during sedation in endoscopy procedure. Values of prediction probability of P_k above 0.75 and percentages of sensitivity and specificity above 70% and 65% respectively were achieved combining TFR functions with bispectral index (BIS) and with concentrations of propofol (Ce_Prop) and remifentanil (Ce_Remi).