Do all sedatives promote biological sleep electroencephalogram patterns? A machine learning framework to identify biological sleep promoting sedatives using electroencephalogram

Background Sedatives are commonly used to promote sleep in intensive care unit patients. However, it is not clear whether sedation-induced states are similar to the biological sleep. We explored if sedative-induced states resemble biological sleep using multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Methods Multichannel EEG datasets from two different sources were used in this study: (1) sedation dataset consisting of 102 healthy volunteers receiving propofol (N = 36), sevoflurane (N = 36), or dexmedetomidine (N = 30), and (2) publicly available sleep EEG dataset (N = 994). Forty-four quantitative time, frequency and entropy features were extracted from EEG recordings and were used to train the machine learning algorithms on sleep dataset to predict sleep stages in the sedation dataset. The predicted sleep states were then compared with the Modified Observer’s Assessment of Alertness/ Sedation (MOAA/S) scores. Results The performance of the model was poor (AUC = 0.55–0.58) in differentiating sleep stages during propofol and sevoflurane sedation. In the case of dexmedetomidine, the AUC of the model increased in a sedation—dependent manner with NREM stages 2 and 3 highly correlating with deep sedation state reaching an AUC of 0.80. Conclusions We addressed an important clinical question to identify biological sleep promoting sedatives using EEG signals. We demonstrate that propofol and sevoflurane do not promote EEG patterns resembling natural sleep while dexmedetomidine promotes states resembling NREM stages 2 and 3 sleep, based on current sleep staging standards.