One of the most challenging predictive data analysis efforts is an accurate prediction of depth of anesthesia (DOA) indicators which has attracted growing attention since it provides patients a safe surgical environment in case of secondary damage caused by intraoperative awareness or brain injury. However, many researchers put heavily handcraft feature extraction or carefully tailored feature engineering to each patient to achieve very high sensitivity and low false prediction rate for a particular dataset. This limits the benefit of the proposed approaches if a different dataset is used. Recently, representations learned using the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for object recognition are becoming a widely used model of the processing hierarchy in the human visual system. The correspondence between models and brain signals that holds the acquired activity at high temporal resolution has been explored less exhaustively. In this paper, deep learning CNN with a range of different architectures is designed for identifying related activities from raw electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, an improved short-time Fourier transform is used to stand for the time-frequency information after extracting the spectral images of the original EEG as input to CNN. Then CNN models are designed and trained to predict the DOA levels from EEG spectrum without handcrafted features, which presents an intuitive mapping process with high efficiency and reliability. As a result, the best trained CNN model achieved an accuracy of 93.50%, interpreted as CNN's deep learning to approximate the DOA by senior anesthesiologists, which highlights the potential of deep CNN combined with advanced visualization techniques for EEG-based brain mapping.INDEX TERMS Depth of anesthesia, convolutional neural network, electroencephalography, short-time Fourier transform.The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Shaojun Wang. anesthesia, which brings clinical safety hazards to patients during surgery [3]. Thus, scientists have been looking for parameters that characterize the DOA from medical signals, so that anesthetic drugs can be used more accurately for achieving anesthesia. However, from which the study of electroencephalogram (EEG) parameters is the most effective [4]-[6], it is still non-standard and no any best solution so far.Recently, EEG-based DOA assessment method has been rapidly developed. With the reason that general anesthesia makes the brain's conscious activity disappear mainly