Abstract

Aim: Our aim is to predict the patients who may benefit from electroconvulsive therapy by examining quantative electroencephalographies’ captured before the electroconvulsive therapy procedure.

Meterial and Methods: A total of 40 patients with psychotic disorder or major depression were included in this study. Electroencephalographies were obtained before electroconvulsive therapy. The Hamilton depression scale scores of the patients with major depression and the positive and negative symptom rating scale scores of psychotic patients before and after 6-12 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy was used to determine whether electroconvulsive therapy was beneficial. Electroencephalography data were analyzed with the Fourier analysis method.

Results: Every electrode signal recorded from the patient electroencephalography in Matlab environment was windowed with a window of sliding amplitude in time axis 1 and length of T=500. The correlation between two windows was quantified. Results generated on a global and electrode basis were observed to not show a significant difference between the two groups .The sub-band for the electroencephalography signals of each electrode and the correlation of the same sub-band belonging to other electrodes were acquired and a global index representing the total mean correlation power was calculated. The symmetry index between the right and left hemisphere in electroencephalographies was also not significant.

Conclusion: In this study we were unable to determine whether a patient would benefit from electroconvulsive therapy using the Electroencephalography signals obtained prior to the treatment. The determination of whether such predictive parameters are of clinical utility for the prediction of outcome awaits further studies.

Key Words: Quantitative EEG; Electroconvulsive Therapy; Fourier Analysis.