Classification of Awareness in Disorders of Consciousness Using Common Spatial Pattern

Advances in intensive care have improved the survival rate of patients with severe acute brain injury, but diagnostic errors for patients with disorders of consciousness are still high. Accurate diagnosis of these patients is very important because effective treatment can vary depending on the diagnosis. In this study, we propose a framework for classifying unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and minimally conscious state, focusing on awareness. In particular, power spectral density and common spatial patterns were used together, considering that spatial information is a key feature in consciousness. The 16 patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and 14 with minimally conscious state underwent resting-state electroencephalography measurements. In addition, we compared the performance by utilizing each frequency (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma bands) related to consciousness. As a result, the highest accuracy of 95.06% was achieved by the EEGNet classifier, especially in the beta frequency band. We demonstrated that spatial information is very important in consciousness, as we observed that classification performance improved when common spatial patterns were used. These results provide insight into various frameworks for diagnosing patients with disorders of consciousness and may help patients survive by increasing the diagnosis rate in the future.