Development of an Interhemispheric Symmetry Measurement in the Neonatal Brain

The automated analysis of the EEG pattern of the preterm newborn would be a valuable tool in the neonatal intensive care units for the prognosis of neurological development. The analysis of the (a)symmetry between the two hemispheres can provide useful information about neuronal dysfunction in early stages. Consecutive and subgroup analyses of different brain regions will allow to detect physiologic asymmetry versus pathologic asymmetry. This can improve the assessment of the long-term neurodevelopmental outcome. We show that pathological asymmetry can be measured and detected using the channel symmetry index, which comprises the difference in power spectral density of contralateral EEG signals. To distinguish pathological from physiological normal EEG patterns, we make use of one-class SVM classifiers. Future work will focus on adding relevant features for classification and augmenting the sample size, thus reducing the overall classification error.