Exploring effects of anesthesia on complexity, differentiation, and integrated information in rat EEG

To investigate mechanisms underlying loss of consciousness, it is important to extend methods established in humans to rodents as well. Perturbational complexity index (PCI) is a promising metric of "capacity for consciousness" and is based on a perturbational approach that allows inferring a system's capacity for causal integration and differentiation of information. These properties have been proposed as necessary for conscious systems. Measures based on spontaneous electroencephalography recordings, however, may be more practical for certain clinical purposes and may better reflect ongoing dynamics. Here, we compare PCI (using electrical stimulation for perturbing cortical activity) to several spontaneous electroencephalography-based measures of signal diversity and integrated information in rats undergoing propofol, sevoflurane, and ketamine anesthesia. We find that, along with PCI, the spontaneous electroencephalography-based measures, Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ) and geometric integrated information (Φ), were best able to distinguish between awake and propofol and sevoflurane anesthesia. However, PCI was anti-correlated with spontaneous measures of integrated information, which generally increased during propofol and sevoflurane anesthesia, contrary to expectations. Together with an observed divergence in network properties estimated from directed functional connectivity (current results) and effective connectivity (earlier results), the perturbation-based results seem to suggest that anesthesia disrupts global cortico-cortical information transfer, whereas spontaneous activity suggests the opposite. We speculate that these seemingly diverging results may be because of suppressed encoding specificity of information or driving subcortical projections from, e.g., the thalamus. We conclude that certain perturbation-based measures (PCI) and spontaneous measures (LZ and Φ) may be complementary and mutually informative when studying altered states of consciousness.