Analysis of EEG signals using complex brain networks

The human brain is so complex that two mega projects, the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative project, are under way in the hope of answering important questions for peoples' health and wellbeing. Complex networks become powerful tools for studying brain function due to the fact that network topologies on real-world systems share small world properties. Examples of these networks are the Internet, biological networks, social networks, climate networks and complex brain networks. Complex brain networks in real time biomedical signal processing applications are limited because some graph algorithms (such as graph isomorphism), cannot be solved in polynomial time. In addition, they are hard to use in single-channel EEG applications, such as clinic applications in sleep scoring and depth of anaesthesia monitoring. The first contribution of this research is to present two novel algorithms and two graph models. A fast weighted horizontal visibility algorithm (FWHVA) overcoming the speed limitations for constructing a graph from a time series is presented. Experimental results show that the FWHVA can be 3.8 times faster than the Fast Fourier Transfer (FFT) algorithm when input signals exceed 4000 data points. A linear time graph isomorphism algorithm (HVGI) can determine the isomorphism of two horizontal visibility graphs (HVGs) in a linear time domain. This is an efficient way to measure the synchronized index between two time series. Difference visibility graphs (DVGs) inherit the advantages of horizontal visibility graphs. They are noise-robust, and they overcome a pitfall of visibility graphs (VG): that the degree distribution (DD) doesn't satisfy a pure power-law. Jump visibility graphs (JVGs) enhance brain graphs allowing the processing of non-stationary biomedical signals. This research shows that the DD of JVGs always satisfies a power-lower if the input signals are purely non-stationary. The second highlight of this work is the study of three clinical biomedical signals: alcoholic, epileptic and sleep EEGs. Based on a synchronization likelihood and maximal weighted matching method, this work finds that the processing repeated stimuli and unrepeated stimuli in the controlled drinkers is larger than that in the alcoholics. Seizure detections based on epileptic EEGs have also been investigated with three graph features: graph entropy of VGs, mean strength of HVGs, and mean degrees of JVGs. All of these features can achieve 100% accuracy in seizure identification and differentiation from healthy EEG signals. Sleep EEGs are evaluated based on VG and DVG methods. It is shown that the complex brain networks exhibit more small world structure during deep sleep. Based on DVG methods, the accuracy peaks at 88:9% in a 5-state sleep stage classification from 14; 943 segments from single-channel EEGs. This study also introduces two weighted complex network approaches to analyse the nonlinear EEG signals. A weighted horizontal visibility graph (WHVG) is proposed to enhance noise-robustness properties. Tested with two Chaos signals and an epileptic EEG database, the research shows that the mean strength of the WHVG is more stable and noise-robust than those features from FFT and entropy. Maximal weighted matching algorithms have been applied to evaluate the difference in complex brain networks of alcoholics and controlled drinkers. The last contribution of this dissertation is to develop an unsupervised classifier for biomedical signal pattern recognition. A Multi-Scale Means (MSK-Means) algorithm is proposed for solving the subject-dependent biomedical signals classification issue. Using JVG features from the epileptic EEG database, the MSK-Means algorithm is 4:7% higher in identifying seizures than those by the K-means algorithm and achieves 92:3% accuracy for localizing the epileptogenic zone. The findings suggest that the outcome of this thesis can improve the performance of complex brain networks for biomedical signal processing and nonlinear time series analysis

A computer aided analysis scheme for detecting epileptic seizure from EEG data

This paper presents a computer aided analysis system for detecting epileptic seizure from electroencephalogram (EEG) signal data. As EEG recordings contain a vast amount of data, which is heterogeneous with respect to a time-period, we intend to introduce a clustering technique to discover different groups of data according to similarities or dissimilarities among the patterns. In the proposed methodology, we use K-means clustering for partitioning each category EEG data set (e.g. healthy; epileptic seizure) into several clusters and then extract some representative characteristics from each cluster. Subsequently, we integrate all the features from all the clusters in one feature set and then evaluate that feature set by three well-known machine learning methods: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive bayes and Logistic regression. The proposed method is tested by a publicly available benchmark database: ‘Epileptic EEG database’. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme with SVM classifier yields overall accuracy of 100% for classifying healthy vs epileptic seizure signals and outperforms all the recent reported existing methods in the literature. The major finding of this research is that the proposed K-means clustering based approach has an ability to efficiently handle EEG data for the detection of epileptic seizure

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

EEG sleep stages identification based on weighted undirected complex networks

Sleep scoring is important in sleep research because any errors in the scoring of the patient's sleep electroencephalography (EEG) recordings can cause serious problems such as incorrect diagnosis, medication errors, and misinterpretations of patient's EEG recordings. The aim of this research is to develop a new automatic method for EEG sleep stages classification based on a statistical model and weighted brain networks. Methods each EEG segment is partitioned into a number of blocks using a sliding window technique. A set of statistical features are extracted from each block. As a result, a vector of features is obtained to represent each EEG segment. Then, the vector of features is mapped into a weighted undirected network. Different structural and spectral attributes of the networks are extracted and forwarded to a least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier. At the same time the network's attributes are also thoroughly investigated. It is found that the network's characteristics vary with their sleep stages. Each sleep stage is best represented using the key features of their networks. Results In this paper, the proposed method is evaluated using two datasets acquired from different channels of EEG (Pz-Oz and C3-A2) according to the R&K and the AASM without pre-processing the original EEG data. The obtained results by the LS-SVM are compared with those by Naïve, k-nearest and a multi-class-SVM. The proposed method is also compared with other benchmark sleep stages classification methods. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method has an advantage in scoring sleep stages based on single channel EEG signals. Conclusions An average accuracy of 96.74% is obtained with the C3-A2 channel according to the AASM standard, and 96% with the Pz-Oz channel based on the R&K standard

時間周波数領域でのてんかん脳波識別に関する研究 ‐平均二乗根に基づく特徴抽出に着目して‐

Epilepsy affects over 50 million people on an average yearly world wide. Epileptic Seizure is a generalised term which has broad classification depending on the reasons behind its occurrence. Parvez et al. when applied feature instantaneous bandwidth B2AM and time averaged bandwidth B2FM for classification of interictal and ictal on Freiburg data base, the result dipped low to 77.90% for frontal lobe whereas it was 80.20% for temporal lobe compare to the 98.50% of classification accuracy achieved on Bonn dataset with same feature for classification of ictal against interictal. We found reasons behind such low results are, first Parvez et al. has used first IMF of EMD for feature computation which mostly noised induce. Secondly, they used same kernel parameters of SVM as Bajaj et al. which they must have optimised with different dataset. But the most important reason we found is that two signals s1 and s2 can have same instantaneous bandwidth. Therefore, the motivation of the dissertation is to address the drawback of feature instantaneous bandwidth by new feature with objective of achieving comparable classification accuracy. In this work, we have classified ictal from healthy nonseizure interictal successfully first by using RMS frequency and another feature from Hilbert marginal spectrum then with its parameters ratio. RMS frequency is the square root of sum of square bandwidth and square of center frequency. Its contributing parameters ratio is ratio of center frequency square to square bandwidth. We have also used dominant frequency and its parameters ratio for the same purpose. Dominant frequency have same physical relevance as RMS frequency but different by definition, i.e. square root of sum of square of instantaneous band- width and square of instantaneous frequency. Third feature that we have used is by exploiting the equivalence of RMS frequency and dominant frequency (DF) to define root mean instantaneous frequency square (RMIFS) as square root of sum of time averaged bandwidth square and center frequency square. These features are average measures which shows good discrimination power in classifying ictal from interictal using SVM. These features, fr and fd also have an advantage of overcoming the draw back of square bandwidth and instantaneous bandwidth. RMS frequency that we have used in this work is different from generic root mean square analysis. We have used an adaptive thresholding algorithm to address the issue of false positive. It was able to increase the specificity by average of 5.9% on average consequently increasing the accuracy. Then we have applied morphological component analysis (MCA) with the fractional contribution of dominant frequency and other rest of the features like band- width parameter’s contribution and RMIFS frequency and its parameters and their ratio. With the results from proposed features, we validated our claim to overcome the drawback of instantaneous bandwidth and square bandwidth.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号：生工博甲第323号 学位授与年月日：平成30年6月28日1 Introduction|2 Empirical Mode Decomposition|3 Root Mean Square Frequency|4 Root Mean Instantaneous Frequency Square|5 Morphological Component Analysis|6 Conclusion九州工業大学平成30年

Using interictal seizure-free EEG data to recognise patients with epilepsy based on machine learning of brain functional connectivity

Most seizures in adults with epilepsy occur rather infrequently and as a result, the interictal EEG plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and classification of epilepsy. However, empirical interpretation, of a first EEG in adult patients, has a very low sensitivity ranging between 29-55%. Useful EEG information remains buried within the signals in seizure-free EEG epochs, far beyond the observational capabilities of any specialised physician in this field. Unlike most of the existing works focusing on either seizure data or single-variate method, we introduce a multi-variate method to characterise sensor level brain functional connectivity from interictal EEG data to identify patients with generalised epilepsy. A total of 9 connectivity features based on 5 different measures in time, frequency and time frequency domains have been tested. The solution has been validated by the K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm, classifying an epilepsy group (EG) vs healthy controls (HC) and subsequently with another cohort of patients characterised by non-epileptic attacks (NEAD), a psychogenic type of disorder. A high classification accuracy (97%) was achieved for EG vs HC while revealing significant spatio temporal deficits in the frontocentral areas in the beta frequency band. For EG vs NEAD, the classification accuracy was only about 73%, which might be a reflection of the well-described coexistence of NEAD with epileptic attacks. Our work demonstrates that seizure-free interictal EEG data can be used to accurately classify patients with generalised epilepsy from HC and that more systematic work is required in this direction aiming to produce a clinically useful diagnostic method