Automated Identification System for Focal EEG Signals Using Fractal Dimension of FAWT-Based Sub-bands Signals

Epileptic seizure focus detection from interictal electroencephalogram: a survey

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of most effective clinical diagnosis modalities for the localization of epileptic focus. Most current AI solutions use this modality to analyze the EEG signals in an automated manner to identify the epileptic seizure focus. To develop AI system for identifying the epileptic focus, there are many recently-published AI solutions based on biomarkers or statistic features that utilize interictal EEGs. In this review, we survey these solutions and find that they can be divided into three main categories: (i) those that use of biomarkers in EEG signals, including high-frequency oscillation, phase-amplitude coupling, and interictal epileptiform discharges, (ii) others that utilize feature-extraction methods, and (iii) solutions based upon neural networks (an end-to-end approach). We provide a detailed description of seizure focus with clinical diagnosis methods, a summary of the public datasets that seek to reduce the research gap in epilepsy, recent novel performance evaluation criteria used to evaluate the AI systems, and guidelines on when and how to use them. This review also suggests a number of future research challenges that must be overcome in order to design more efficient computer-aided solutions to epilepsy focus detection.

Detection of focal and non-focal EEG signals using non-linear features derived from empirical wavelet transform rhythms

Surgery is recommended for epilepsy diagnosis in cases where patients do not respond well to anti-epilepsy medications. Successful surgery is essentially dependent on the area suffered from epilepsy, i.e., focal area. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are considered a powerful tool to identify focal or non-focal (normal) areas. In this work, we propose an automated method for focal and non-focal EEG signal identification, taking into account non-linear features derived from rhythms in the empirical wavelet transform (EWT) domain. The research paradigm is related to the decomposition of EEG signals into the delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma rhythms through the development of the EWT. Specifically, various non-linear features are extracted from rhythms composed of Stein's unbiased risk estimation entropy, threshold entropy, centered correntropy, and information potential. From a statistical point of view, Kruskal-Wallis (KW) statistical test is then used to identify the significant features. The significant features obtained from the KW test are fed to support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifiers. The SURE entropy provides an average classification accuracy of 93% and 82.6% for small and entire datasets by utilizing SVM and KNN classifiers with a tenfold cross-validation method, respectively. It is observed that the proposed method is better and competitive in comparison with other studies for small and large data, respectively. The obtained outcome concludes that the proposed framework could be used for people with epilepsy and can help the physicians to validate the assessment.

Detection of focal electroencephalogram signals using higher-order moments in EMD-TKEO domain

Detection of epileptogenic focus based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signal screening is an important pre-surgical step to remove affected regions inside the human brain. Considering the fact above, in this work, a novel technique for detection of focal EEG signals is proposed using a combination of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO). EEG signals belonging to focal (Fo) and non-focal (NFo) groups were at first decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using EMD. Next, TKEO was applied on each IMF and two higher-order statistical moments namely skewness and kurtosis were extracted as features from TKEO of each IMF. The statistical significance of the selected features was evaluated using student's t-test and based on the statistical test, features from first three IMFs which show very high discriminative capability were selected as inputs to a support vector machine classifier for discrimination of Fo and NFo signals. It was observed that the classification accuracy of 92.65% is obtained in classifying EEG signals using a radial basis kernel function, which demonstrates the efficacy of proposed EMD-TKEO based feature extraction method for computer-based treatment of patients suffering from focal seizures.