Blind Experiment Based on Dynamic Approximate Entropy Measure for Quasi-brain-death EEG

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) based preliminary examination has been proposed in the clinical brain death determination. In the EEG signal analysis process, Approximate Entropy (ApEn) as a complexity based method appears to have potential for the application to physiological and clinical time-series data. In our previous studies, in the condition of knowing about the clinical state of patients from the standard process of brain-death diagnosis, the same results could be obtained by using our developed ApEn measure for quasi-brain-death EEG. In this paper, we present this dynamic complexity measure based blind experiment without knowing about the clinical symptoms of patients beforehand. Features obtained from three typical cases indicate one patient being in coma and the other changing from com to quasi-brain-death. Being identical to further clinical diagnose, results of thirteen cases from nine patients illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and implies its significance of a reference for brain death diagnosis in clinical practice.