Electrocorticography based monitoring of anaesthetic depth in mice

ABSTRACT To improve animal welfare and data quality and reproducibility during research conducted under anaesthesia, anaesthetic depth in laboratory animals must be precisely monitored and controlled. While a variety of methods have been developed to estimate the depth of anaesthesia in humans, such tools for monitoring anaesthetic depth in laboratory animals remain limited. Here we propose an epidural electrocorticogram-based monitoring system that accurately tracks the depth of anesthesia in mice receiving inhalable isoflurane anaesthesia. Several features of the electrocorticogram signals exhibit robust modulation by the concentration of the administered anesthetic, notably, corticocortical coherence serves as an excellent indicator of anaesthetic depth. We developed a gradient boosting regressor framework that utilizes the extracted features to accurately estimate the depth of anaesthesia. Our method for feature extraction and estimation is conducted with a latency of only ten seconds, establishing a system for the real-time tracking of anaesthetic depth in mice.