Six-center Assessment of CNN-Transformer with Belief Matching Loss for Patient-independent Seizure Detection in EEG

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel patient-independent seizure detection system using CNN-transformers with belief matching loss, evaluated across multiple datasets, achieving high sensitivity and precision while being fast enough for clinical use.

Contribution

The study introduces a new CNN-transformer based seizure detector with belief matching loss, capable of patient-independent detection in scalp and intracranial EEGs, evaluated on five datasets.

Findings

Achieved sensitivity of 0.617-1.00 across datasets

Attained precision of 0.534-1.00

Detection takes less than 15 seconds for 30-minute EEGs

Abstract

Neurologists typically identify epileptic seizures from electroencephalograms (EEGs) by visual inspection. This process is often time-consuming, especially for EEG recordings that last hours or days. To expedite the process, a reliable, automated, and patient-independent seizure detector is essential. However, developing a patient-independent seizure detector is challenging as seizures exhibit diverse characteristics across patients and recording devices. In this study, we propose a patient-independent seizure detector to automatically detect seizures in both scalp EEG and intracranial EEG (iEEG). First, we deploy a convolutional neural network with transformers and belief matching loss to detect seizures in single-channel EEG segments. Next, we extract regional features from the channel-level outputs to detect seizures in multi-channel EEG segments. At last, we apply postprocessing filters to the segment-level outputs to determine seizures' start and end points in multi-channel EEGs. Finally, we introduce the minimum overlap evaluation scoring as an evaluation metric that accounts for minimum overlap between the detection and seizure, improving upon existing assessment metrics. We trained the seizure detector on the Temple University Hospital Seizure (TUH-SZ) dataset and evaluated it on five independent EEG datasets. We evaluate the systems with the following metrics: sensitivity (SEN), precision (PRE), and average and median false positive rate per hour (aFPR/h and mFPR/h). Across four adult scalp EEG and iEEG datasets, we obtained SEN of 0.617-1.00, PRE of 0.534-1.00, aFPR/h of 0.425-2.002, and mFPR/h of 0-1.003. The proposed seizure detector can detect seizures in adult EEGs and takes less than 15s for a 30 minutes EEG. Hence, this system could aid clinicians in reliably identifying seizures expeditiously, allocating more time for devising proper treatment.