Quantitative EEG Analysis in Intensive Care Patients

Intensive care units (ICUs) are special departments of hospitals focusing on the treatment of patients with severe and life-threatening conditions. During their stay at the ICU, the patients are carefully monitored. The monitoring of vital signs focuses on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems while less attention is given to the brain. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the most convenient way to measure the brain function of ICU patients and several advantages related to the measurement devices and analysis of the signal have brought it recently closer to routine care in the ICU. Quantitative EEG (qEEG) provides computationally derived measures from the EEG that enables easier and better analysis of continuous long-term recordings. This chapter focuses on how qEEG can be utilized in the assessment and treatment of ICU patients. We first describe the most common EEG artifacts seen in the ICU environment and how they can be detected and removed. We then go through how qEEG is applied to different conditions including comatose cardiac arrest survivors and patients with traumatic brain injury, status epilepticus, and subarachnoid hemorrhage. In the end of the chapter, a summary of the content and some future aspects related to the application of qEEG in the ICU are provided.