Deep learning for estimation of functional brain maturation from EEG of premature neonates.

EEG monitoring of early brain function and development in neonatal intensive care units may help to identify infants with high risk of serious neurological impairment and to assess brain maturation for evaluation of neurodevelopmental progress. Automated analysis of EEG data makes continuous evaluation of brain activity fast and accessible. A convolutional neural network (CNN) for regression of EEG maturational age of premature neonates from marginally preprocessed serial EEG recordings is proposed. The CNN was trained and validated using 141 EEG recordings from 43 preterm neonates born below 28 weeks of gestation with normal neurodevelop-mental outcome at 12 months of corrected age. The estimated functional brain maturation between the first and last EEG recording increased in each patient. On average over 96% of repeated measures within an infant had an increasing EEG maturational age according to the post menstrual age at EEG recording time. Our algorithm has potential to be deployed to support neonatologists for accurate estimation of functional brain maturity in premature neonates.

Automated cot-side tracking of functional brain age in preterm infants.

OBJECTIVE: A major challenge in the care of preterm infants is the early identification of compromised neurological development. While several measures are routinely used to track anatomical growth, there is a striking lack of reliable and objective tools for tracking maturation of early brain function; a cornerstone of lifelong neurological health. We present a cot-side method for measuring the functional maturity of the newborn brain based on routinely available neurological monitoring with electroencephalography (EEG). METHODS: We used a dataset of 177 EEG recordings from 65 preterm infants to train a multivariable prediction of functional brain age (FBA) from EEG. The FBA was validated on an independent set of 99 EEG recordings from 42 preterm infants. The difference between FBA and postmenstrual age (PMA) was evaluated as a predictor for neurodevelopmental outcome. RESULTS: The FBA correlated strongly with the PMA of an infant, with a median prediction error of less than 1 week. Moreover, individual babies follow well-defined individual trajectories. The accuracy of the FBA applied to the validation set was statistically equivalent to the training set accuracy. In a subgroup of infants with repeated EEG recordings, a persistently negative predicted age difference was associated with poor neurodevelopmental outcome. INTERPRETATION: The FBA enables the tracking of functional neurodevelopment in preterm infants. This establishes proof of principle for growth charts for brain function, a new tool to assist clinical management and identify infants who will benefit most from early intervention.

Automated classification of neonatal sleep states using EEG.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a method for automated neonatal sleep state classification based on EEG that can be applied over a wide range of age. METHODS: We collected 231 EEG recordings from 67 infants between 24 and 45weeks of postmenstrual age. Ten minute epochs of 8 channel polysomnography (N=323) from active and quiet sleep were used as a training dataset. We extracted a set of 57 EEG features from the time, frequency, and spatial domains. A greedy algorithm was used to define a reduced feature set to be used in a support vector machine classifier. RESULTS: Performance tests showed that our algorithm was able to classify quiet and active sleep epochs with 85% accuracy, 83% sensitivity, and 87% specificity. The performance was not substantially lowered by reducing the epoch length or EEG channel number. The classifier output was used to construct a novel trend, the sleep state probability index, that improves the visualisation of brain state fluctuations. CONCLUSIONS: A robust EEG-based sleep state classifier was developed. It performs consistently well across a large span of postmenstrual ages. SIGNIFICANCE: This method enables the visualisation of sleep state in preterm infants which can assist clinical management in the neonatal intensive care unit.