Analysis of EEG Patterns in Vigil and Fatigue States during the Execution of Laparoscopic Tasks

Fatigue decreases efficiency in performance of several professional activities; therefore, being in that state could trigger technical mistakes which consequences could be lethal, such as in health area, where a surgical error due to the absence of rest can lead to the patient death. For this reason, in this study the vigil and fatigue (due to sleep) states, that affect cognitive processes in medical students, were identified through Electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns. The EEG signals of 18 physician students were analyzed within the theta band (4 - 8 Hz) over fronto-central recording sites, and the alpha band (8 - 13 Hz) rhythms over temporal and parieto-occipital recording sites during the execution of laparoscopic tasks before and after their guard. The signal-processing pipeline consisted in preprocessing based on individual component analysis, absolute band power estimates, and SVM classification. The f-score to differ between vigil and fatigue was 90.89%, where the first state showed more slightly identifiable EEG patterns reaching a sensitivity of 90.18%. The pre-processed EEG signals are shared in this site.