A Brain-Machine Interface for Control of Medically-Induced Coma

Maryam Modir Shanechi, Jessica J. Chemali, Max Liberman, Ken Solt, Emery N. Brown

Abstract: Author Summary Brain-machine interfaces (BMI) for closed-loop control of anesthesia have the potential to enable fully automated and precise control of brain states in patients requiring anesthesia care. Medically-induced coma is one such drug-induced state in which the brain is profoundly inactivated and unconscious and the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern consists of bursts of electrical activity alternating with periods of suppression, termed burst suppression. Medical coma is induced to treat refractory intracranial hypertension and uncontrollable seizures. The state of coma is often required for days, making accurate manual control infeasible. We develop a BMI that can automatically and precisely control the level of burst suppression in real time in individual rodents. The BMI consists of novel estimation and control algorithms that take as input the EEG activity, estimate the burst suppression level based on this activity, and use this estimate as feedback to control the drug infusion rate in real time. The BMI maintains precise control and promptly changes the level of burst suppression while avoiding overshoot or undershoot. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of automatic reliable and accurate control of medical coma that can provide considerable therapeutic benefits.