Is EEG a Useful Examination Tool for Diagnosis of Epilepsy and Comorbid Psychiatric Disorders?

Diagnosis of epilepsy usually involves interviewing the patients and the individuals who witnessed the seizure. An electroencephalogram (EEG) adds useful information for the diagnosis of epilepsy when epileptic abnormalities emerge. EEG exhibits nonlinearity and weak stationarity. Thus, nonlinear EEG analysis may be useful for clinical application. We examined only about English language studies of nonlinear EEG analysis that compared normal EEG and interictal EEG and reported the accuracy. We identified 60 studies from the public data of Andrzejak 2001 and two studies that did not use the data of Andrzejak 2001. Comorbid psychiatric disorders in patients with epilepsy were not reported in nonlinear EEG analysis except for one case series of comorbid psychotic disorders. Using a variety of feature extraction methods and classifier methods, we concluded that the studies that used the data of Andrzejak 2001 played a valuable role in EEG diagnosis of epilepsy. In the future, according to the evolution of artificial intelligence, deep learning, new nonlinear analysis methods, and the EEG association with the rating scale of the quality of life and psychiatric symptoms, we anticipate that EEG diagnosis of epilepsy, seizures, and comorbid psychiatric disorders in patients with epilepsy will be possible

Artificial immune system and particle swarm optimization for electroencephalogram based epileptic seizure classification

Automated analysis of brain activity from electroencephalogram (EEG) has indispensable applications in many fields such as epilepsy research. This research has studied the abilities of negative selection and clonal selection in artificial immune system (AIS) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to produce different reliable and efficient methods for EEG-based epileptic seizure recognition which have not yet been explored. Initially, an optimization-based classification model was proposed to describe an individual use of clonal selection and PSO to build nearest centroid classifier for EEG signals. Next, two hybrid optimization-based negative selection models were developed to investigate the integration of the AIS-based techniques and negative selection with PSO from the perspective of classification and detection. In these models, a set of detectors was created by negative selection as self-tolerant and their quality was improved towards non-self using clonal selection or PSO. The models included a mechanism to maintain the diversity and generality among the detectors. The detectors were produced in the classification model for each class, while the detection model generated the detectors only for the abnormal class. These hybrid models differ from each other in hybridization configuration, solution representation and objective function. The three proposed models were abstracted into innovative methods by applying clonal selection and PSO for optimization, namely clonal selection classification algorithm (CSCA), particle swarm classification algorithm (PSCA), clonal negative selection classification algorithm (CNSCA), swarm negative selection classification algorithm (SNSCA), clonal negative selection detection algorithm (CNSDA) and swarm negative selection detection algorithm (SNSDA). These methods were evaluated on EEG data using common measures in medical diagnosis. The findings demonstrated that the methods can efficiently achieve a reliable recognition of epileptic activity in EEG signals. Although CNSCA gave the best performance, CNSDA and SNSDA are preferred due to their efficiency in time and space. A comparison with other methods in the literature showed the competitiveness of the proposed methods

High-performance detection of epilepsy in seizure-free EEG recordings: A novel machine learning approach using very specific epileptic EEG sub-bands

We applied machine learning to diagnose epilepsy based on the fine-graded spectral analysis of seizure-free (resting state) EEG recordings. Despite using unspecific agglomerated EEG spectra, our fine-graded spectral analysis specifically identified the two EEG resting state sub-bands differentiating healthy people from epileptics (1.5-2 Hz and 11-12.5 Hz). The rigorous evaluation of completely unseen data of 100 EEG recordings (50 belonging to epileptics and the other 50 to healthy people) shows that the approach works successfully, achieving an outstanding accuracy of 99 percent, which significantly outperforms the current benchmark of 70% to 95% by a panel of up to three experienced neurologists. Our epilepsy diagnosis classifier can be implemented in modern EEG analysis devices, especially in intensive care units where early diagnosis and appropriate treatment are decisive in life and death scenarios and where physicians’ error rates are particularly high. Our approach is accurate, robust, fast, and cost-efficient and substantially contributes to Information Systems research in healthcare. The approach is also of high practical and theoretical relevance

Development of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals classification techniques

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most important signals recorded from humans. It can assist scientists and experts to understand the most complex part of the human body, the brain. Thus, analysing EEG signals is the most preponderant process to the problem of extracting significant information from brain dynamics. It plays a prominent role in brain studies. The EEG data are very important for diagnosing a variety of brain disorders, such as epilepsy, sleep problems, and also assisting disability patients to interact with their environment through brain computer interface (BCI). However, the EEG signals contain a huge amount of information about the brain’s activities. But the analysis and classification of these kinds of signals is still restricted. In addition, the manual examination of these signals for diagnosing related diseases is time consuming and sometimes does not work accurately. Several studies have attempted to develop different analysis and classification techniques to categorise the EEG recordings. The analysis of EEG recordings can lead to a better understanding of the cognitive process. It is used to extract the important features and reduce the dimensions of EEG data. In the classification process, machine learning algorithms are used to detect the particular class of EEG signal based on its extracted features. The performance of these algorithms, in which the class membership of the input signal is determined, can then be used to infer what event in the real-world process occurred to produce the input signal. The classification procedure has the potential to assist experts to diagnose the related brain disorders. To evaluate and diagnose neurological disorders properly, it is necessary to develop new automatic classification techniques. These techniques will help to classify different EEG signals and determine whether a person is in a good health or not. This project aims to develop new techniques to enhance the analysis and classification of different categories of EEG data. A simple random sampling (SRS) and sequential feature selection (SFS) method was developed and named the SRS_SFS method. In this method, firstly, a SRS technique was used to extract statistical features from the original EEG data in time domain. The extracted features were used as the input to a SFS algorithm for key features selection. A least square support vector machine (LS_SVM) method was then applied for EEG signals classification to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Secondly, a novel approach that combines optimum allocation (OA) and spectral density estimation methods was proposed to analyse EEG signals and classify an epileptic seizure. In this study, the OA technique was introduced in two levels to determine representative sample points from the EEG recordings. To reduce the dimensions of sample points and extract representative features from each OA sample segment, two power spectral density estimation methods, periodogram and autoregressive, were used. At the end, three popular machine learning methods (support vector machine (SVM), quadratic discriminant analysis, and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN)) were employed to evaluate the performance of the suggested algorithm. Additionally, a Tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) based algorithm was developed for epileptic EEG feature extraction. The extracted features were forwarded to the bagging tree, k-NN, and SVM as classifiers to evaluate the performance of the proposed feature extraction technique. The proposed TQWT method was tested on two different EEG databases. Finally, a new classification system was presented for epileptic seizures detection in EEGs blending frequency domain with information gain (InfoGain) technique. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) or discrete wavelet transform (DWT) were applied individually to analyse EEG recording signals into frequency bands for feature extraction. To select the most important feature, the infoGain technique was employed. A LS_SVM classifier was used to evaluate the performance of this system. The research indicates that the proposed techniques are very practical and effective for classifying epileptic EEG disorders and can assist to present the most important clinical information about patients with brain disorders

fNIRS improves seizure detection in multimodal EEG-fNIRS recordings

In the context of epilepsy monitoring, electroencephalography (EEG) remains the modality of choice. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a relatively innovative modality that cannot only characterize hemodynamic profiles of seizures but also allow for long-term recordings. We employ deep learning methods to investigate the benefits of integrating fNIRS measures for seizure detection. We designed a deep recurrent neural network with long short-term memory units and subsequently validated it using the CHBMIT scalp EEG database-a compendium of 896 h of surface EEG seizure recordings. After validating our network using EEG, fNIRS, and multimodal data comprising a corpus of 89 seizures from 40 refractory epileptic patients was used as model input to evaluate the integration of fNIRS measures. Following heuristic hyperparameter optimization, multimodal EEG-fNIRS data provide superior performance metrics (sensitivity and specificity of 89.7% and 95.5%, respectively) in a seizure detection task, with low generalization errors and loss. False detection rates are generally low, with 11.8% and 5.6% for EEG and multimodal data, respectively. Employing multimodal neuroimaging, particularly EEG-fNIRS, in epileptic patients, can enhance seizure detection performance. Furthermore, the neural network model proposed and characterized herein offers a promising framework for future multimodal investigations in seizure detection and prediction

Developing artificial intelligence models for classification of brain disorder diseases based on statistical techniques

The Abstract is currently unavailable, due to the thesis being under Embargo