Non-linear classifiers applied to EEG analysis for epilepsy seizure detection

This work presents a novel approach for automatic epilepsy seizure detection based on EEG analysis that exploits the underlying non-linear nature of EEG data. In this paper, two main contributions are presented and validated: the use of non-linear classifiers through the so-called kernel trick and the proposal of a Bag-of-Words model for extracting a non-linear feature representation of the input data in an unsupervised manner. The performance of the resulting system is validated with public datasets, previously processed to remove artifacts or external disturbances, but also with private datasets recorded under realistic and non-ideal operating conditions. The use of public datasets caters for comparison purposes whereas the private one shows the performance of the system under realistic circumstances of noise, artifacts, and signals of different amplitudes. Moreover, the proposed solution has been compared to state-of-the-art works not only for pre-processed and public datasets but also with the private datasets. The mean F1-measure shows a 10% improvement over the second-best ranked method including cross-dataset experiments. The obtained results prove the robustness of the proposed solution to more realistic and variable conditions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Diagnosing epilepsy using entropy measures and embedding parameters of EEG signals

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects normal neural activity. These electrical activities can be recorded as signals containing information about the brain known as Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Analysis of the EEG signals by individuals for epilepsy diagnosis is subjective and time-consuming. So, an automatic classification system with high detection accuracy is required to overcome possible errors. In this study, the discrete wavelet transform has been applied to EEG signals. Then, entropy measures and embedding parameters have been extracted. These features have been investigated individually to find the most discriminating ones. The significance level of each feature was evaluated by statistical analysis. Consequently, LDA and SVM algorithms have been employed to categorize the EEG signals. The results have indicated that the features of Embedding parameters, PermutationEntropy, FuzzyEntropy, SampleEntropy, NormEntropy, SureEntropy, LogEntropy, and ThresholdEntropy have the potential to discriminate epileptic patients from healthy subjects significantly. Also, SVM classifier has achieved the highest classification accuracy. In this study, we could find effective embedding-based and entropy-based features as appropriate single measures for identifying abnormal activities that can efficiently discriminate the EEG signals of epileptics from healthy individuals. According to the results, they can be used for automatic classification of epileptic EEG signals that are difficult to examine visually

Ensemble approach on enhanced compressed noise EEG data signal in wireless body area sensor network

The Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is used for communication among sensor nodes operating on or inside the human body in order to monitor vital body parameters and movements. One of the important applications of WBASN is patients’ healthcare monitoring of chronic diseases such as epileptic seizure. Normally, epileptic seizure data of the electroencephalograph (EEG) is captured and compressed in order to reduce its transmission time. However, at the same time, this contaminates the overall data and lowers classification accuracy. The current work also did not take into consideration that large size of collected EEG data. Consequently, EEG data is a bandwidth intensive. Hence, the main goal of this work is to design a unified compression and classification framework for delivery of EEG data in order to address its large size issue. EEG data is compressed in order to reduce its transmission time. However, at the same time, noise at the receiver side contaminates the overall data and lowers classification accuracy. Another goal is to reconstruct the compressed data and then recognize it. Therefore, a Noise Signal Combination (NSC) technique is proposed for the compression of the transmitted EEG data and enhancement of its classification accuracy at the receiving side in the presence of noise and incomplete data. The proposed framework combines compressive sensing and discrete cosine transform (DCT) in order to reduce the size of transmission data. Moreover, Gaussian noise model of the transmission channel is practically implemented to the framework. At the receiving side, the proposed NSC is designed based on weighted voting using four classification techniques. The accuracy of these techniques namely Artificial Neural Network, Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbour, and Support Victor Machine classifiers is fed to the proposed NSC. The experimental results showed that the proposed technique exceeds the conventional techniques by achieving the highest accuracy for noiseless and noisy data. Furthermore, the framework performs a significant role in reducing the size of data and classifying both noisy and noiseless data. The key contributions are the unified framework and proposed NSC, which improved accuracy of the noiseless and noisy EGG large data. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework and provided several credible benefits including simplicity, and accuracy enhancement. Finally, the research improves clinical information about patients who not only suffer from epilepsy, but also neurological disorders, mental or physiological problems

EpilepIndex: A novel feature engineering tool to detect epilepsy using EEG signals

Epilepsy is a common neurological disease characterized by seizures. A person with a seizure onset can lose consciousness which in turn can lead to fatal accidents. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a recording of the electrical signals from the brain which is used to analyse the epileptic seizures. Physical visual examination of the EEG by trained neurologists is subjective and highly difficult due to the non-linear complex nature of the EEG. This opens a window for automatic detection of epileptic seizures using machine learning methods. In this work, we have used a standard database that consists of five different sets of EEG data including the epileptic EEG. Using this data, we have devised a novel 22 possible clinically significant cases with the combination of binary and multi class type of classification problem to automatically classify epileptic EEG. As the EEG is non-linear, we have devised 11 statistically significant non-linear entropy features to extract from this database. These features are fed to 10 different classifiers of various types for each of the 22 clinically significant cases and their classification accuracy is reported for 10-fold cross validation. Random Forest and Optimized Forest classifiers reported accuracies above 90% for all 22 cases considered in this study. Such vast possible clinically significant 22 cases from the combination of the data from the database considered has not been in the literature with the best of the knowledge of the authors. Comparing with the literature, several studies have presented one or few combinations of these 22 cases in this work. In comparison to similar works, the accuracies obtained by the classifiers were highly competitive. In addition, a novel integrated epilepsy detection index named EpilepIndex (IED) is able to differentiate between epileptic EEG and a normal EEG with 100% accuracy

Automated Classification of EEG Signals Using Component Analysis and Support Vector Machines

Epileptic seizures are characterized by abnormal electrical activity occurring in the brain. EEG records the seizures demonstrating changes in signal morphology. These signal characteristics, however, differ between patients as well as between different seizures in the same patient. Epilepsy is managed with anti-epileptic medications but in some extreme cases surgery might be necessary. Non-invasive surface electrode EEG measurement gives an estimate of the seizure onset but more invasive intra-cranial electrocorticogram (ECoG) are required at times for precise localization of the epileptogenic zone. The epileptogenic zone can be described as the cortical area targeted for resection to render the patient symptom free. Epileptologists use the “evolution” of aberrant signals for identifying epileptic seizures and the epileptogenic zone is identified by concentrating on the area contributing to the onset of seizure. This process is done by visually analyzing hours of ECoG data. The signal morphology during an epileptic seizure is not very different from abnormal discharges noticed in ECoG data thereby complicating signal analysis for the epileptologists. This thesis aims to classify the ECoG channel data as epileptic or non-epileptic using an automated machine learning algorithm called support vector machines (SVM). The data will be decomposed into various frequency bands identified by wavelet transform and will span the range of 0-30Hz. Statistical measures will be applied to these frequency bands to identify features that will subsequently be used to train SVM. This thesis will further investigate feature reduction using multivariate analysis methods to train the SVM and compare it to the performance of classification when all the features were used to train SVM. Results show that channel data classification using trained SVM that did not undergo feature reduction performed better with 98% sensitivity but needed more runtime than the SVM algorithms that was trained using reduced features. For high frequency analysis of frequencies between 60-500Hz, the results show the same sensitivity yet less specificity when compared to the classification using lower frequency range of 0-30Hz. The results seen in this thesis show that support vector machines classifiers can be trained to classify the data as epileptic or non-epileptic with good accuracy. Even though training the classifiers took almost two hours, it was still noticeably less than other machine learning algorithms such as artificial neural networks. The accuracy of this algorithm can be improved with changes to the data segment length, size of training matrix, accuracy of epileptic and nonepileptic data, and amount of data used for training

Entropy Measures of Electroencephalograms towards the Diagnosis of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures

Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) may resemble epileptic seizures but are not caused by epileptic activity. However, the analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals with entropy algorithms could help identify patterns that differentiate PNES and epilepsy. Furthermore, the use of machine learning could reduce the current diagnosis costs by automating classification. The current study extracted the approximate sample, spectral, singular value decomposition, and Renyi entropies from interictal EEGs and electrocardiograms (ECG)s of 48 PNES and 29 epilepsy subjects in the broad, delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands. Each feature-band pair was classified by a support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbour (kNN), random forest (RF), and gradient boosting machine (GBM). In most cases, the broad band returned higher accuracy, gamma returned the lowest, and combining the six bands together improved classifier performance. The Renyi entropy was the best feature and returned high accuracy in every band. The highest balanced accuracy, 95.03%, was obtained by the kNN with Renyi entropy and combining all bands except broad. This analysis showed that entropy measures can differentiate between interictal PNES and epilepsy with high accuracy, and improved performances indicate that combining bands is an effective improvement for diagnosing PNES from EEGs and ECGs

Effective electroencephalogram based epileptic seizure detection using support vector machine and statistical moment’s features

Epilepsy is one of the widespread disorders. It is a noncommunicable disease that affects the human nerve system. Seizures are abnormal patterns of behavior in the electricity of the brain which produce symptoms like losing consciousness, attention or convulsions in the whole body. This paper demonstrates an effective electroencephalogram (EEG) based seizure detection method using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) for signal decomposition to extract features. An automatic channel selection method was proposed by the researcher to select the best channel from 23 channels based on maximum variance value. The records were segmented into a nonoverlapping segment with long 1-S. The support vector machine (SVM) model was used to automatically detect segments that contain seizures, using both frequency and time domain statistical moment features. The experimental result was obtained from 24 patients in CHB-MIT database. The average accuracy is 94.1, sensitivity is 93.5, specificity is 94.6 and the false positive rate average is 0.054

Identification and Use of PSD-Derived Features for the Contextual Detection and Classification of EEG Epileptiform Transients

Epilepsy is a chronic disorder, which is characterized by seizures. For diagnosis, trained neu-rologists go over the patient’s EEG (Electroencephalograph) records looking for epileptic transients. This is a tedious and long process. The objective of this thesis is to automate the procedure by developing a detector that would pick out epileptic transients containing the ”Abnormal Epileptiform Paroxysmal” (AEP) type. The process was split into detection of potential AEPs and the classification of the detected segments. The detection of potential AEPs (called Yellow Boxing) passed boxed segments of the EEG signal to be classified as to segments that contain paroxysmal activity or not. For yellow boxing potential AEPs, a neural network was trained to determine if the signal contained in a sliding window was to be yellow boxed or not. If yellow boxed, the yellow box was then classified using a neural network trained to handle the classification problem. The networks were trained based on yellow boxes (potential AEPs) marked by trained neurologists. The resulting performance of the networks was studied using sensitivity, specificity and precision as parameters. The overall performance of the detector was verified with respect to expert marked AEPs. An additional parameter, based on the detected AEP length, was also introduced for detection to overcome the drawbacks found in using specificity