Assessment of the depth of anesthesia based on symbolic dynamics of the EEG

Methodologies based on symbolic dynamics have successfully demonstrated to reflect the nonlinear behavior of biological signals. In the present study, symbolic dynamics was applied to the electroencephalogram (EEG) in order to describe the level of depth of anesthesia. The EEG was transformed to symbol sequences. Words of three symbols were built from this symbolic series. The results obtained from the EEGs of 36 patients undergoing anesthesia showed that the probabilities of the word types were able to reflect the depth of anesthesia in a similar way to the auditory evoked potential index AAI, a commercial index.