Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 6, 2025
SECONDs Administration Guidelines: A Fast Tool to Assess Consciousness in Brain-injured Patients
Published on: February 6, 2021
DeltaScan for the Assessment of Acute Encephalopathy and Delirium in ICU and non-ICU Patients, a Prospective
Fienke L Ditzel1, Suzanne C A Hut1, Mark van den Boogaard2
1Department of Intensive Care Medicine and UMC Utrecht Brain Center (FLD, SCAH, MB, DMB, AJCS), University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Objectives:
To measure the diagnostic accuracy of DeltaScan: a portable real-time brain state monitor for identifying delirium, a manifestation of acute encephalopathy (AE) detectable by polymorphic delta activity (PDA) in single-channel electroencephalograms (EEGs).
Design:
Prospective cross-sectional study.
Setting:
Six Intensive Care Units (ICU's) and 17 non-ICU departments, including a psychiatric department across 10 Dutch hospitals.
Participants:
494 patients, median age 75 (IQR:64-87), 53% male, 46% in ICUs, 29% delirious.
Measurements:
DeltaScan recorded 4-minute EEGs, using an algorithm to select the first 96 seconds of artifact-free data for PDA detection. This algorithm was trained and calibrated on two independent datasets.
Methods:
Initial validation of the algorithm for AE involved comparing its output with an expert EEG panel's visual inspection. The primary objective was to assess DeltaScan's accuracy in identifying delirium against a delirium expert panel's consensus.
Results:
DeltaScan had a 99% success rate, rejecting 6 of the 494 EEG's due to artifacts. Performance showed and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.86 (95% CI: 0.83-0.90) for AE (sensitivity: 0.75, 95%CI=0.68-0.81, specificity: 0.87 95%CI=0.83-0.91. The AUC was 0.71 for delirium (95%CI=0.66-0.75, sensitivity: 0.61 95%CI=0.52-0.69, specificity: 72, 95%CI=0.67-0.77). Our validation aim was an NPV for delirium above 0.80 which proved to be 0.82 (95%CI: 0.77-0.86). Among 84 non-delirious psychiatric patients, DeltaScan differentiated delirium from other disorders with a 94% (95%CI: 87-98%) specificity.
Conclusions:
DeltaScan can diagnose AE at bedside and shows a clear relationship with clinical delirium. Further research is required to explore its role in predicting delirium-related outcomes.
