Towards improved design and evaluation of epileptic seizure predictors

Abstract—Objective: Key issues in the epilepsy seizure prediction research are (1) the reproducibility of results (2) the inability to compare multiple approaches directly. To overcome these problems, the Seizure Prediction Challenge was organized on Kaggle.com. It aimed at establishing benchmarks on a dataset with predefined train, validation and test sets. Our main objective is to analyse the competition format, and to propose improvements, which would facilitate a better comparison of algorithms. The second objective is to present a novel deep learning approach to seizure prediction and compare it to other commonly used methods using patient centered metrics. Methods: We used the competition’s datasets to illustrate the effects of data contamination. Having better data partitions, we compared three types of models in terms of different objectives. Results: We found that correct selection of test samples is crucial when evaluating the performance of seizure forecasting models. Moreover, we showed that models, which achieve state-of-the-art performance with respect to commonly used AUC, sensitivity and specificity metrics, may not yet be suitable for practical usage because of low precision scores. Conclusion: Correlation between validation and test datasets used in the competition limited its scientific value. Significance: Our findings provide guidelines which allow for a more objective evaluation of seizure prediction models

Involvement of fast-spiking cells in ictal sequences during spontaneous seizures in rats with chronic temporal lobe epilepsy

Epileptic seizures represent altered neuronal network dynamics, but the temporal evolution and cellular substrates of the neuronal activity patterns associated with spontaneous seizures are not fully understood. We used simultaneous recordings from multiple neurons in the hippocampus and neocortex of rats with chronic temporal lobe epilepsy to demonstrate that subsets of cells discharge in a highly stereotypical sequential pattern during ictal events, and that these stereotypical patterns were reproducible across consecutive seizures. In contrast to the canonical view that principal cell discharges dominate ictal events, the ictal sequences were predominantly composed of fast-spiking, putative inhibitory neurons, which displayed unusually strong coupling to local field potential even before seizures. The temporal evolution of activity was characterized by unique dynamics where the most correlated neuronal pairs before seizure onset displayed the largest increases in correlation strength during the seizures. These results demonstrate the selective involvement of fast spiking interneurons in structured temporal sequences during spontaneous ictal events in hippocampal and neocortical circuits in experimental models of chronic temporal lobe epilepsy

A Performance Comparison of Neural Network and SVM Classifiers Using EEG Spectral Features to Predict Epileptic Seizures

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, and afflicts approximately 70 million people globally. 30-40% of patients have refractory epilepsy, where seizures cannot be controlled by anti-epileptic medication, and surgery is neither appropriate, nor available. The unpredictable nature of epileptic seizures is the primary cause of mortality among patients, and leads to significant psychosocial disability. If seizures could be predicted in advance, automatic seizure warning systems could transform the lives of millions of people. This study presents a performance comparison of artificial neural network and sup port vector machine classifiers, using EEG spectral features to predict the onset of epileptic seizures. In addition, the study also examines the influence of EEG window size, feature selection, and data sampling on classification performance. A total of 216 generalised models were trained and tested on a public seizure database, which contained over 1300 hours of EEG data from 7 subjects. The results showed that ANN outperform SVM, when using spectral features (p = 0.035). The beta and gamma frequency bands were shown to be the best predictors of seizure onset. No significant differences in performance were determined for the dif ferent window sizes, or for the feature selection methods. The data sampling method significantly influenced the performance (p \u3c 0.001), and highlighted the importance of treating class imbalance in EEG datasets

Oscillatory Network Activity in Brain Functions and Dysfunctions

Recent experimental studies point to the notion that the brain is a complex dynamical system whose behaviors relating to brain functions and dysfunctions can be described by the physics of network phenomena. The brain consists of anatomical axonal connections among neurons and neuronal populations in various spatial scales. Neuronal interactions and synchrony of neuronal oscillations are central to normal brain functions. Breakdowns in interactions and modifications in synchronization behaviors are usual hallmarks of brain dysfunctions. Here, in this dissertation for PhD degree in physics, we report discoveries of brain oscillatory network activity from two separate studies. These studies investigated the large-scale brain activity during tactile perceptual decision-making and epileptic seizures. In the perceptual decision-making study, using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain potentials, we investigated how oscillatory activity functionally organizes different neocortical regions as a network during a tactile discrimination task. While undergoing EEG recordings, blindfolded healthy participants felt a linear three-dot array presented electromechanically, under computer control, and reported whether the central dot was offset to the left or right. Based on the current dipole modeling in the brain, we found that the source-level peak activity appeared in the left primary somatosensory cortex (SI), right lateral occipital complex (LOC), right posterior intraparietal sulcus (pIPS) and finally left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) at 45, 130, 160 and 175 ms respectively. Spectral interdependency analysis showed that fine tactile discrimination is mediated by distinct but overlapping ~15 Hz beta and ~80 Hz gamma band large-scale oscillatory networks. The beta-network that included all four nodes was dominantly feedforward, similar to the propagation of peak cortical activity, implying its role in accumulating and maintaining relevant sensory information and mapping to action. The gamma-network activity, occurring in a recurrent loop linked SI, pIPS and dlPFC, likely carrying out attentional selection of task-relevant sensory signals. Behavioral measure of task performance was correlated with the network activity in both bands. In the study of epileptic seizures, we investigated high-frequency (\u3e 50 Hz) oscillatory network activity from intracranial EEG (IEEG) recordings of patients who were the candidates for epilepsy surgery. The traditional approach of identifying brain regions for epilepsy surgery usually referred as seizure onset zones (SOZs) has not always produced clarity on SOZs. Here, we investigated directed network activity in the frequency domain and found that the high frequency (\u3e80 Hz) network activities occur before the onset of any visible ictal activity, andcausal relationships involve the recording electrodes where clinically identifiable seizures later develop. These findings suggest that high-frequency network activities and their causal relationships can assist in precise delineation of SOZs for surgical resection

Seizure prediction : ready for a new era

Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge colleagues in the international seizure prediction group for valuable discussions. L.K. acknowledges funding support from the National Health and Medical Research Council (APP1130468) and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (220020419) and acknowledges the contribution of Dean R. Freestone at the University of Melbourne, Australia, to the creation of Fig. 3.Peer reviewedPostprin

Automated Epileptic Seizure Onset Detection

Epilepsy is a serious neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures due to abnormal or excessive neuronal activity in the brain. An estimated 50 million people around the world suffer from this condition, and it is classified as the second most serious neurological disease known to humanity, after stroke. With early and accurate detection of seizures, doctors can gain valuable time to administer medications and other such anti-seizure countermeasures to help reduce the damaging effects of this crippling disorder. The time-varying dynamics and high inter-individual variability make early prediction of a seizure state a challenging task. Many studies have shown that EEG signals do have valuable information that, if correctly analyzed, could help in the prediction of seizures in epileptic patients before their occurrence. Several mathematical transforms have been analyzed for its correlation with seizure onset prediction and a series of experiments were done to certify their strengths. New algorithms are presented to help clarify, monitor, and cross-validate the classification of EEG signals to predict the ictal (i.e. seizure) states, specifically the preictal, interictal, and postictal states in the brain. These new methods show promising results in detecting the presence of a preictal phase prior to the ictal state

Permutation entropy and its main biomedical and econophysics applications: a review

Entropy is a powerful tool for the analysis of time series, as it allows describing the probability distributions of the possible state of a system, and therefore the information encoded in it. Nevertheless, important information may be codified also in the temporal dynamics, an aspect which is not usually taken into account. The idea of calculating entropy based on permutation patterns (that is, permutations defined by the order relations among values of a time series) has received a lot of attention in the last years, especially for the understanding of complex and chaotic systems. Permutation entropy directly accounts for the temporal information contained in the time series; furthermore, it has the quality of simplicity, robustness and very low computational cost. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the original work, here we analyze the theoretical foundations of the permutation entropy, as well as the main recent applications to the analysis of economical markets and to the understanding of biomedical systems.Facultad de Ingenierí