A Prospective Trial of Nonconvulsive Electrographic Seizure Detection by Nurses in the Adult Neuro ICU Using a Panel of Quantitative EEG Trends

This research is being conducted to determine if Neuroscience intensive care unit (ICU) nurses are able to identify seizures by reviewing quantitative EEG (qEEG) that is running at the bedside. QEEG is the application of mathematical and analytical techniques to analyze EEG signals. Several hours of data can be displayed on a single screen in several graphical panels. Routine evaluation of EEG data consists of manual inspection of each page of EEG data by a trained neurophysiologist (a neuro ICU doctor) and can be quite time-consuming. In most cases, this data can only be reviewed intermittently and interpretation is almost always relayed to the primary clinical team after the seizures have occurred. Theoretically,qEEG graphical displays can provide a simplified view of complex EEG data that could possibly be used by non-neurophysiologists, such as Neuro ICU nurses. Our hypothesis is that Neuro ICU nurses are able to accurately identify recurrent seizures in real-time.