Performance metrics for characterization of a seizure detection algorithm for offline and online use

Purpose: To select appropriate previously reported performance metrics to evaluate a new seizure detection algorithm for offline and online analysis, and thus quantify any performance variation between these metrics. Methods: Traditional offline algorithms mark out any EEG section (epoch) of a seizure (event), so that neurologists only analyze the detected and adjacent sections. Thus, offline algorithms could be evaluated using number of correctly detected events, or event-based sensitivity (SEVENT), and epoch-based specificity (percentage of incorrectly detected background epochs). In contrast, online seizure detection (especially, data selection) algorithms select for transmission only the detected EEG sections and hence need to detect the entire duration of a seizure. Thus, online algorithms could be evaluated using percentage of correctly detected seizure duration, or epoch-based sensitivity (SEPOCH), and epoch-based specificity. Here, a new seizure detection algorithm is evaluated using the selected performance metrics for epoch duration ranging from 1s to 60s. Results: For 1s epochs, the area under the event-based sensitivity-specificity curve was 0.95 whilst SEPOCH achieves 0.81. This difference is not surprising, as intuitively, detecting any epoch within a seizure is easier than detecting every epoch - especially as seizures evolve over time. For longer epochs of 30s or 60s, SEVENT falls to 0.84 and 0.82 respectively and SEPOCH reduces to 0.76. Here, decreased SEVENT shows that fewer seizures are detected, possibly due to easy-to-detect short seizure sections being masked by surrounding EEG. However, detecting one long epoch constitutes a larger percentage of a seizure than a shorter one and thus SEPOCH does not decrease proportionately. Conclusions: Traditional offline and online seizure detection algorithms require different metrics to effectively evaluate their performance for their respective applications. Using such metrics, it has been shown that a decrease in performance may be expected when an offline seizure detection algorithm (especially with short epoch duration) is used for online analysis.Accepted versio

Dynamical Component Analysis (DyCA) and its application on epileptic EEG

Dynamical Component Analysis (DyCA) is a recently-proposed method to detect projection vectors to reduce the dimensionality of multi-variate deterministic datasets. It is based on the solution of a generalized eigenvalue problem and therefore straight forward to implement. DyCA is introduced and applied to EEG data of epileptic seizures. The obtained eigenvectors are used to project the signal and the corresponding trajectories in phase space are compared with PCA and ICA-projections. The eigenvalues of DyCA are utilized for seizure detection and the obtained results in terms of specificity, false discovery rate and miss rate are compared to other seizure detection algorithms.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 201

Neonatal Seizure Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks

This study presents a novel end-to-end architecture that learns hierarchical representations from raw EEG data using fully convolutional deep neural networks for the task of neonatal seizure detection. The deep neural network acts as both feature extractor and classifier, allowing for end-to-end optimization of the seizure detector. The designed system is evaluated on a large dataset of continuous unedited multi-channel neonatal EEG totaling 835 hours and comprising of 1389 seizures. The proposed deep architecture, with sample-level filters, achieves an accuracy that is comparable to the state-of-the-art SVM-based neonatal seizure detector, which operates on a set of carefully designed hand-crafted features. The fully convolutional architecture allows for the localization of EEG waveforms and patterns that result in high seizure probabilities for further clinical examination.Comment: IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processin