Lagged Correlations among Physiological Variables as Indicators of Consciousness in Stroke Patients

Consciousness is a highly significant indicator of an ICU patient's condition but there is still no method to automatically measure it. Instead, time consuming and subjective assessments are used. However, many brain and physiologic variables are measured continuously in neurological ICU, and could be used as indicators for consciousness. Since many biological variables are highly correlated to maintain homeostasis, we examine whether changes in time lags between correlated variables may relate to changes in consciousness. We introduce new methods to identify changes in the time lag of correlations, which better handle noisy multimodal physiological data and fluctuating lags. On neurological ICU data from subarachnoid hemorrhage patients, we find that correlations among variables related to brain physiology or respiration have significantly longer lags inpatients with decreased levels of consciousness than in patients with higher levels of consciousness. This suggests that physiological data could potentially be used to automatically assess consciousness.