A robust seizure detection and prediction method with feature selection and spatio-temporal casual neural network model

Abstract

Abstract Objective. Epilepsy is a fairly common condition that affects the brain and causes frequent seizures. The sudden and recurring epilepsy brings a series of safety hazards to patients, which seriously affects the quality of their life. Therefore, real-time diagnosis of electroencephalogram (EEG) in epilepsy patients is of great significance. However, the conventional methods take in a tremendous amount of features to train the models, resulting in high computation cost and low portability. Our objective is to propose an efficient, light and robust seizure detecting and predicting algorithm. Approach. The algorithm is based on an interpretative feature selection method and spatial-temporal causal neural network (STCNN). The feature selection method eliminates the interference factors between different features and reduces the model size and training difficulties. The STCNN model takes both temporal and spatial information to accurately and dynamically track and diagnose the changing of the features. Considering the differences between medical application scenarios and patients, leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) and cross-patient validation (CPV) methods are used to conduct experiments on the dataset collected at the Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB-MIT), Siena and Kaggle competition datasets. Main results. In LOOCV-based method, the detection accuracy and prediction sensitivity have been improved. A significant improvement is also achieved in the CPV-based method. Significance. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm exhibits superior performance and robustness in seizure detection and prediction, which indicates it has higher capability to deal with different and complicated clinical situations.