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Session: Birth & Neonates
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 13:30
Presentation starts: 13:45
Room: Lecture room 558

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Mario Lavanga (STADIUS, ESAT, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)
Chiara Bernagie (UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)
Alexander Caicedo (MACC, Universidad del Rosario, Bogota', Colombia)
Katrien Jansen (UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)
Els Ortibus (UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)
Gunnar Naulaers (UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)
Sabine Van Huffel (STADIUS, ESAT, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)

Abstract:
Due to the early stress in the neonatal intensive care unit, premature patients might be prone to delayed brain maturation. Some example of stressor events are apneas or long bradycardias, which disrupt the sleep-wake cycle [1]. The goal of this research is to detect stress in preterm infants based on EEG activity, heart-rate variability (HRV) and their interaction. Multichannel EEG and ECG were recorded from 29 premature patients during 4 hours, while the stress levels were assessed using the Leuven Pain Score. After the HRV computation, bradycardia events were located and the associated EEG δ oscillations were extracted via an analytic wavelet transform, using a window starting 3 min before the bradycardia until three min afterwards. We used standard time and spectral features, in addition, the coupling between the δ oscillations and the HRV (EEG-HRV) and the connectivity among EEG channels (EEG-EEG) were computed via analytic Wavelet Coherence and the time-delay stability analysis [2]. A least-squares support vector machines (LS-SVM) classifier was implemented to discriminate between bradycardias during stress and in its absence. The main conclusion is that brain-heart (EEG-HRV) coupling outperforms other methodologies in the classification of the bradycardias. This is shown by AUC metrics for the different features: 0.76 for EEG-HRV, 0.71 for EEG-EEG connectivity, 0.69 for univariate EEG, 0.63 for univariate HRV. Furthermore, an increase in connectivity during the bradycardia event and its enhancement with higher stress levels indicates an impact of the autonomic system on the brain, which could affect the patient’s normal development.