Deep neural networks for automatic classification of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness

Despite the common use of anesthetics to modulate consciousness in the clinic, brain-based monitoring of consciousness is uncommon. We combined electroencephalographic measurement of brain activity with deep neural networks to automatically discriminate anesthetic states induced by propofol. Our results with leave-one-participant-out-cross-validation show that convolutional neural networks significantly outperform multilayer perceptrons in discrimination accuracy when working with raw time series. Perceptrons achieved comparable accuracy when provided with power spectral densities. These findings highlight the potential of deep convolutional networks for completely automatic extraction of useful spatio-temporo-spectral features from human EEG. © 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.