Changes in EEG frequency characteristics during sevoflurane general anesthesia: feature extraction by variational mode decomposition

Mode decomposition is a method for extracting the characteristic intrinsic mode function (IMF) from various multidimensional time-series signals. Variational mode decomposition (VMD) searches for IMFs by optimizing the bandwidth to a narrow band with the [Formula: see text] norm while preserving the online estimated central frequency. In this study, we applied VMD to the analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded during general anesthesia. Using a bispectral index monitor, EEGs were recorded from 10 adult surgical patients (the median age: 47.0, and the percentile range: 27.0-59.3 years) who were anesthetized with sevoflurane. We created an application named EEG Mode Decompositor, which decomposes the recorded EEG into IMFs and displays the Hilbert spectrogram. Over the 30-min recovery from general anesthesia, the median (25-75 percentile range) bispectral index increased from 47.1 (42.2-50.4) to 97.4 (96.5-97.6), and the central frequencies of IMF-1 showed a significant change from 0.4 (0.2-0.5) Hz to 0.2 (0.1-0.3) Hz. IMF-2, IMF-3, IMF-4, IMF-5, and IMF-6 increased significantly from 1.4 (1.2-1.6) Hz to 7.5 (1.5-9.3) Hz, 6.7 (4.1-7.6) Hz to 19.4 (6.9-20.0) Hz, 10.9 (8.8-11.4) Hz to 26.4 (24.2-27.2) Hz, 13.4 (11.3-16.6) Hz to 35.6 (34.9-36.1) Hz, and 12.4 (9.7-18.1) Hz to 43.2 (42.9-43.4) Hz, respectively. The characteristic frequency component changes in specific IMFs during emergence from general anesthesia were visually captured by IMFs derived using VMD. EEG analysis by VMD is useful for extracting distinct changes during general anesthesia.