Suitability of an inter-burst detection method for grading hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy in newborn EEG

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2019 Jul:2019:4125-4128. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2019.8857000.

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an important clinical tool for grading injury caused by lack of oxygen or blood to the brain during birth. Characteristics of low-voltage waveforms, known as inter-bursts, are related to different grades of injury. This study assesses the suitability of an existing inter-burst detection method, developed from preterm infants born <; 30 weeks of gestational age, to detect inter-bursts in term infants. Different features from the temporal organisation of the inter-bursts are combined using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) machine learning algorithm to classify four grades of injury in the EEG. We find that the best performing feature, percentage of inter-bursts, has an accuracy of 59.3%. Combining this with the maximum duration of inter-bursts in the MLP produces a testing accuracy of 77.8%, with similar performance to existing multi-feature methods. These results validate the use of the preterm detection method in term EEG and show how simple measures of the inter-burst interval can be used to classify different grades of injury.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Brain / physiopathology
  • Electroencephalography*
  • Humans
  • Hypoxia-Ischemia, Brain / classification
  • Hypoxia-Ischemia, Brain / diagnosis*
  • Infant, Newborn
  • Infant, Premature