Abstract
The brain death is defined as the cessation and irreversibility of all brain and brain stem functions. Based on this definition, the basic clinical criterion has been established in most countries. However, in the standard process of brain death diagnosis, it often involves certain risks and takes a long time. Therefore, in order to reduce the risk and to save the precious time for the medical care in clinical practice, an EEG-based preliminary examination system was proposed in the standard clinical procedure. The purpose of the preliminary EEG examination is to explore advanced signal processing tools to discover whether any brain wave activity occurs in the patient's brain. The EEG preliminary examination system includes a portable EEG data acquisition tool and the EEG-oriented signal processing tools. The signal processing tools include several routines of noise reduction, source separation, feature extraction, as well as statistical tests. This study will demonstrate the performance using the approximate entropy and EEG energy criteria to evaluate the differences between deep comatose patients and brain death.
