A curated video curriculum and primary literature on EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia — free to view, designed for clinicians who want to start reading the brain in the operating room today.
Our recommended starting point is the EEG for Anesthesia YouTube channel — a concise, evidence-based introduction to the EEG signal and how anesthetic drugs shape it. PALNET's in-OR teaching and workshops build directly on this foundation.
Current standards for assessing depth of anesthesia rely on indirect measures — heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tone, and presumed drug interactions. Modern systems-level neuroscience now lets us link recognizable EEG signatures to the anesthetic states produced by most commonly used drugs. Familiarity with these signatures helps anesthesia clinicians make more detailed and accurate assessments of the anesthetic state of their patients. These videos provide a brief, accessible introduction to the EEG signal as it relates to altered states of arousal caused by anesthesia.
Peer-reviewed publications PALNET teachers recommend. Every entry links to the authoritative publisher version (DOI) — and to an open-access copy where one exists.
Ten papers we recommend as the foundation for any clinician beginning to learn EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia.
Brown EN, Lydic R, Schiff ND · New England Journal of Medicine · 2010;363(27):2638–2650
The foundational synthesis of how anesthetics produce unconsciousness, situating anesthetic states alongside natural sleep and pathologic coma. The mental model everything else in this list builds on.
Purdon PL, Sampson A, Pavone KJ, Brown EN · Anesthesiology · 2015;123(4):937–960
The single most-cited reference in this field. Walks the practising anesthesiologist through raw EEG, the density spectral array (DSA), and the characteristic signatures of each anesthetic drug class — exactly the vocabulary PALNET teaches in workshops.
Guay J, Agrawal M, et al. · Anesthesiology · 2025
The follow-up to Purdon's 2015 reference, focused on active EEG management in the operating room and ICU. The "how do I act on what I see?" counterpart to Part I.
Yuan I, Bong CL, Chao JY · Korean Journal of Anesthesiology · 2024;77(3):289–305
PALNET officer Ian Yuan's comprehensive update on pediatric intraoperative EEG monitoring — neurodevelopmental EEG changes, non-proprietary parameters for dosing, epileptiform changes during induction, and how EEG translates to clinical outcomes. The most current pediatric review.
Bong CL, Balanza GA, Khoo CEH, et al. · Anesthesia & Analgesia · 2023
A narrative review illustrating, with annotated EEG examples, when and how EEG-guided practice changes pediatric anesthesia management. Useful for clinicians who want to see concrete case-based reasoning rather than theory.
Cornelissen L, Kim S-E, Purdon PL, Brown EN, Berde CB · eLife · 2015;4:e06513
Seminal demonstration that the pediatric EEG under sevoflurane has fundamentally different age-dependent signatures than the adult EEG. The empirical foundation for everything PALNET teaches about developmental EEG.
Yuan I, Xu T, Skowno J · Anesthesiology Clinics · 2020;38(3):709–725
The most clinician-friendly practical guide we recommend: how to actually titrate propofol and sevoflurane using the EEG you have in front of you. Written by a PALNET officer.
Yuan I, Missett RM, et al. · Pediatric Anesthesia · 2022
First major implementation paper documenting how an academic pediatric anesthesia department rolled out an EEG-guided propofol education program. PALNET's site-visit and train-the-trainer model builds directly on this work.
von Dincklage F, Helfrich K, Koch S, et al. · BMC Anesthesiology · 2025
Describes the standardized perioperative EEG training model developed by PALNET's collaborator, the Safe Brain Initiative. Provides much of the framework PALNET site visits and workshops draw on.
Kurth CD · JAMA Pediatrics · 2025
PALNET founder C. Dean Kurth's editorial framing EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia as a quality innovation worth structured implementation. The clinical-quality argument behind PALNET's existence.
Additional papers organized by topic. Click any heading to expand.
PALNET links to canonical publisher pages rather than hosting PDFs directly, in keeping with academic publishing licenses. If a paper is available open-access through the journal or PubMed Central, the DOI link will resolve to that version automatically.
A PALNET site visit brings two to three days of in-OR, case-based teaching directly to your institution — followed by ongoing mentorship.