Early EEG monitoring predicts clinical outcome in patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury

There is a need for reliable predictors in patients with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury to assist clinical decision making. We assess the ability of early continuous EEG monitoring at the intensive care unit (ICU) in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) to predict long term clinical outcome and evaluate its complementary value to current clinical standards. We performed continuous EEG measurements in patients with moderate to severe TBI during the first week of ICU admission. We assessed the Extended Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOSE) at 12 months, dichotomized into poor (GOSE 1–3) and good (GOSE 4–8) outcome. We extracted EEG spectral features, brain symmetry index, coherence, aperiodic exponent of the power spectrum, long range temporal correlations, and broken detailed balance. A random forest classifier using feature selection was trained to predict poor clinical outcome based on EEG features at 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96 h after trauma. We compared our predictor with the IMPACT score, the best available predictor, based on clinical, radiological and laboratory findings. In addition we created a combined model using EEG as well as the clinical, radiological and laboratory findings. We included hundred-seven patients. The best prediction model using EEG parameters was found at 72 h after trauma with an AUC of 0.82 (0.69–0.92), specificity of 0.83 (0.67–0.99) and sensitivity of 0.74 (0.63–0.93). The IMPACT score predicted poor outcome with an AUC of 0.81 (0.62–0.93), sensitivity of 0.86 (0.74–0.96) and specificity of 0.70 (0.43–0.83). A model using EEG and clinical, radiological and laboratory parameters resulted in a better prediction of poor outcome (p < 0.001) with an AUC of 0.89 (0.72–0.99), sensitivity of 0.83 (0.62–0.93) and specificity of 0.85 (0.75–1.00). EEG features have potential use for predicting clinical outcome and decision making in patients with moderate to severe TBI and provide complementary information to current clinical standards.