Dynamic classifiers for neonatal brain monitoring

Brain injury due to lack of oxygen or impaired blood flow around the time of birth, may cause long term neurological dysfunction or death in severe cases. The treatments need to be initiated as soon as possible and tailored according to the nature of the injury to achieve best outcomes. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) currently provides the best insight into neurological activities. However, its interpretation presents formidable challenge for the neurophsiologists. Moreover, such expertise is not widely available particularly around the clock in a typical busy Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Therefore, an automated computerized system for detecting and grading the severity of brain injuries could be of great help for medical staff to diagnose and then initiate on-time treatments. In this study, automated systems for detection of neonatal seizures and grading the severity of Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE) using EEG and Heart Rate (HR) signals are presented. It is well known that there is a lot of contextual and temporal information present in the EEG and HR signals if examined at longer time scale. The systems developed in the past, exploited this information either at very early stage of the system without any intelligent block or at very later stage where presence of such information is much reduced. This work has particularly focused on the development of a system that can incorporate the contextual information at the middle (classifier) level. This is achieved by using dynamic classifiers that are able to process the sequences of feature vectors rather than only one feature vector at a time

Exploring temporal information in neonatal seizures using a dynamic time warping based SVM kernel

Seizure events in newborns change in frequency, morphology, and propagation. This contextual information is explored at the classifier level in the proposed patient-independent neonatal seizure detection system. The system is based on the combination of a static and a sequential SVM classifier. A Gaussian dynamic time warping based kernel is used in the sequential classifier. The system is validated on a large dataset of EEG recordings from 17 neonates. The obtained results show an increase in the detection rate at very low false detections per hour, particularly achieving a 12% improvement in the detection of short seizure events over the static RBF kernel based system

Automated Grading of Newborn EEG Background Activity

Background: Electroencephalography (EEG) depicts electrical activity in the brain, and can be used in clinical practice to monitor brain function. In neonatal care, physicians can use continuous bedside EEG monitoring to determine the cerebral recovery of newborns who have suffered birth asphyxia, which creates a need for frequent, accurate interpretation of the signals over a period of monitoring. An automated grading system can aid physicians in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by automatically distinguishing between different grades of abnormality in the neonatal EEG background activity patterns. Methods: This thesis describes using support vector machine as a base classifier to classify seven grades of EEG background pattern abnormality in data provided by the BAby Brain Activity (BABA) Center in Helsinki. We are particularly interested in reconciling the manual grading of EEG signals by independent graders, and we analyze the inter-rater variability of EEG graders by building the classifier using selected epochs graded in consensus compared to a classifier using full-duration recordings. Results: The inter-rater agreement score between the two graders was κ=0.45, which indicated moderate agreement between the EEG grades. The most common grade of EEG abnormality was grade 0 (continuous), which made up 63% of the epochs graded in consensus. We first trained two baseline reference models using the full-duration recording and labels of the two graders, which achieved 71% and 57% accuracy. We achieved 82% overall accuracy in classifying selected patterns graded in consensus into seven grades using a multi-class classifier, though this model did not outperform the two baseline models when evaluated with the respective graders’ labels. In addition, we achieved 67% accuracy in classifying all patterns from the full-duration recording using a multilabel classifier