A Generalised Seizure Prediction with Convolutional Neural Networks for Intracranial and Scalp Electroencephalogram Data Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a generalized seizure prediction method using CNNs on intracranial and scalp EEG data, achieving high sensitivity and low false prediction rates across multiple datasets without extensive patient-specific feature engineering.

Contribution

The authors develop a CNN-based seizure prediction approach that generalizes across different datasets and EEG types, reducing reliance on handcrafted features and patient-specific tuning.

Findings

Achieved sensitivities above 81% on all datasets.

Maintained low false prediction rates below 0.23/h.

Statistically outperformed random predictors in most cases.

Abstract

Seizure prediction has attracted a growing attention as one of the most challenging predictive data analysis efforts in order to improve the life of patients living with drug-resistant epilepsy and tonic seizures. Many outstanding works have been reporting great results in providing a sensible indirect (warning systems) or direct (interactive neural-stimulation) control over refractory seizures, some of which achieved high performance. However, many works put heavily handcraft feature extraction and/or carefully tailored feature engineering to each patient to achieve very high sensitivity and low false prediction rate for a particular dataset. This limits the benefit of their approaches if a different dataset is used. In this paper we apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on different intracranial and scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) datasets and proposed a generalized retrospective and patient-specific seizure prediction method. We use Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) on 30-second EEG windows with 50% overlapping to extract information in both frequency and time domains. A standardization step is then applied on STFT components across the whole frequency range to prevent high frequencies features being influenced by those at lower frequencies. A convolutional neural network model is used for both feature extraction and classification to separate preictal segments from interictal ones. The proposed approach achieves sensitivity of 81.4%, 81.2%, 82.3% and false prediction rate (FPR) of 0.06/h, 0.16/h, 0.22/h on Freiburg Hospital intracranial EEG (iEEG) dataset, Children's Hospital of Boston-MIT scalp EEG (sEEG) dataset, and Kaggle American Epilepsy Society Seizure Prediction Challenge's dataset, respectively. Our prediction method is also statistically better than an unspecific random predictor for most of patients in all three datasets.