Wavelet-based sparse functional linear model with applications to EEGs seizure detection and epilepsy diagnosis

A novel approach to automatic seizure detection using computer vision and independent component analysis

OBJECTIVE

Epilepsy is a neurological disease that affects ~50 million people worldwide, 30% of which have refractory epilepsy and recurring seizures, which may contribute to higher anxiety levels and poorer quality of life. Seizure detection may contribute to addressing some of the challenges associated with this condition, by providing information to health professionals regarding seizure frequency, type, and/or location in the brain, thereby improving diagnostic accuracy and medication adjustment, and alerting caregivers or emergency services of dangerous seizure episodes. The main focus of this work was the development of an accurate video-based seizure-detection method that ensured unobtrusiveness and privacy preservation, and provided novel approaches to reduce confounds and increase reliability.

METHODS

The proposed approach is a video-based seizure-detection method based on optical flow, principal component analysis, independent component analysis, and machine learning classification. This method was tested on a set of 21 tonic-clonic seizure videos (5-30 min each, total of 4 h and 36 min of recordings) from 12 patients using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation.

RESULTS

High accuracy levels were observed, namely a sensitivity and specificity of 99.06% ± 1.65% at the equal error rate and an average latency of 37.45 ± 1.31 s. When compared to annotations by health care professionals, the beginning and ending of seizures was detected with an average offset of 9.69 ± 0.97 s.

SIGNIFICANCE

The video-based seizure-detection method described herein is highly accurate. Moreover, it is intrinsically privacy preserving, due to the use of optical flow motion quantification. In addition, given our novel independence-based approach, this method is robust to different lighting conditions, partial occlusions of the patient, and other movements in the video frame, thereby setting the base for accurate and unobtrusive seizure detection.

RNN and BiLSTM Fusion for Accurate Automatic Epileptic Seizure Diagnosis Using EEG Signals

Epilepsy is a common neurological condition. The effects of epilepsy are not restricted to seizures alone. They comprise a wide spectrum of problems that might impair and reduce quality of life. Even with medication, 30% of epilepsy patients still have recurring seizures. An epileptic seizure is caused by significant neuronal electrical activity, which affects brain activity. EEG shows these changes as high-amplitude spiky and sluggish waves. Recognizing seizures on an electroencephalogram (EEG) manually by a professional neurologist is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, hence an efficient automated approach is necessary for the identification of epileptic seizure. One technique to increase the speed and accuracy with which a diagnosis of epileptic seizures could be made is by utilizing computer-aided diagnosis systems that are built on deep neural networks, or DNN. This study introduces a fusion of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and bi-directional long short-term memories (BiLSTMs) for automatic epileptic seizure identification via EEG signal processing in order to tackle the aforementioned informational challenges. An electroencephalogram's (EEG) raw data were first normalized after undergoing pre-processing. A RNN model was fed the normalized EEG sequence data and trained to accurately extract features from the data. Afterwards, the features were passed to the BiLSTM layers for processing so that further temporal information could be retrieved. In addition, the proposed RNN-BiLSTM model was tested in an experimental setting using the freely accessible UCI epileptic seizure dataset. Experimental findings of the suggested model have achieved avg values of 98.90%, 98.50%, 98. 20%, and 98.60%, respectively, for accuracy, sensitivity, precision, and specificity. To further verify the new model's efficacy, it is compared to other models, such as the RNN-LSTM and the RNN-GRU learning models, and is shown to have improved the same metrics by 1.8%, 1.69%, 1.95%, and 2.2% on using 5-fold. Additionally, the proposed method was compared to state-of-the-art approaches and proved to be a more accurate categorization of such techniques.

Significant Low-dimensional Spectral-temporal Features for Seizure Detection

Absence seizure as a generalized onset seizure, simultaneously spreading seizure to both sides of the brain, involves around ten-second sudden lapses of consciousness. It common occurs in children than adults, which affects living quality even threats lives. Absence seizure can be confused with inattentive attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder since both have similar symptoms, such as inattention and daze. Therefore, it is necessary to detect absence seizure onset. However, seizure onset detection in electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a challenging task due to the non-stereotyped seizure activities as well as their stochastic and non-stationary characteristics in nature. Joint spectral-temporal features are believed to contain sufficient and powerful feature information for absence seizure detection. However, the resulting high-dimensional features involve redundant information and require heavy computational load. Here, we discover significant low-dimensional spectral-temporal features in terms of mean-standard deviation of wavelet transform coefficient (MS-WTC), based on which a novel absence seizure detection framework is developed. The EEG signals are transformed into the spectral-temporal domain, with their low-dimensional features fed into a convolutional neural network. Superior detection performance is achieved on the widely-used benchmark dataset as well as a clinical dataset from the Chinese 301 Hospital. For the former, seven classification tasks were evaluated with the accuracy from 99.8% to 100.0%, while for the latter, the method achieved a mean accuracy of 94.7%, overwhelming other methods with low-dimensional temporal and spectral features. Experimental results on two seizure datasets demonstrate reliability, efficiency and stability of our proposed MS-WTC method, validating the significance of the extracted low-dimensional spectral-temporal features.

Brain functional and effective connectivity based on electroencephalography recordings: A review

Functional connectivity and effective connectivity of the human brain, representing statistical dependence and directed information flow between cortical regions, significantly contribute to the study of the intrinsic brain network and its functional mechanism. Many recent studies on electroencephalography (EEG) have been focusing on modeling and estimating brain connectivity due to increasing evidence that it can help better understand various brain neurological conditions. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive updated review on studies of EEG-based brain connectivity, particularly on visualization options and associated machine learning applications, aiming to translate those techniques into useful clinical tools. This article reviews EEG-based functional and effective connectivity studies undertaken over the last few years, in terms of estimation, visualization, and applications associated with machine learning classifiers. Methods are explored and discussed from various dimensions, such as either linear or nonlinear, parametric or nonparametric, time-based, and frequency-based or time-frequency-based. Then it is followed by a novel review of brain connectivity visualization methods, grouped by Heat Map, data statistics, and Head Map, aiming to explore the variation of connectivity across different brain regions. Finally, the current challenges of related research and a roadmap for future related research are presented.

An integrated entropy-spatial framework for automatic gender recognition enhancement of emotion-based EEGs

Investigating gender differences based on emotional changes using electroencephalogram (EEG) is essential to understand various human behavior in the individual situation in our daily life. However, gender differences based on EEG and emotional states are not thoroughly investigated. The main novelty of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to propose an automated gender recognition system through the investigation of five entropies which were integrated as a set of entropy domain descriptors (EDDs) to illustrate the changes in the complexity of EEGs. Second, the combination EDD set was used to develop a customized EEG framework by estimating the entropy-spatial descriptors (ESDs) set for identifying gender from emotional-based EEGs. The proposed methods were validated on EEGs of 30 participants who examined short emotional video clips with four audio-visual stimuli (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutral). The individual performance of computed entropies was statistically examined using analysis of variance (ANOVA) to identify a gender role in the brain emotions. Finally, the proposed ESD framework performance was evaluated using three classifiers: support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (kNN) and random forest (RF), and long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning model. The results illustrated the effect of individual EDD features as remarkable indices for investigating gender while studying the relationship between EEG brain activity and emotional state changes. Moreover, the proposed ESD achieved significant enhancement in classification accuracy with SVM indicating that ESD may offer a helpful path for reliable improvement of the gender detection from emotional-based EEGs.

Convolutional neural network based on recurrence plot for EEG recognition

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a typical physiological signal. The classification of EEG signals is of great significance to human beings. Combining recurrence plot and convolutional neural network (CNN), we develop a novel method for classifying EEG signals. We select two typical EEG signals, namely, epileptic EEG and fatigue driving EEG, to verify the effectiveness of our method. We construct recurrence plots from EEG signals. Then, we build a CNN framework to classify the EEG signals under different brain states. For the classification of epileptic EEG signals, we design three different experiments to evaluate the performance of our method. The results suggest that the proposed framework can accurately distinguish the normal state and the seizure state of epilepsy. Similarly, for the classification of fatigue driving EEG signals, the method also has a good classification accuracy. In addition, we compare with the existing methods, and the results show that our method can significantly improve the detection results.

Complexity and Entropy Analysis to Improve Gender Identification from Emotional-Based EEGs

Investigating gender differences based on emotional changes becomes essential to understand various human behaviors in our daily life. Ten students from the University of Vienna have been recruited by recording the electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset while watching four short emotional video clips (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutral) of audiovisual stimuli. In this study, conventional filter and wavelet (WT) denoising techniques were applied as a preprocessing stage and Hurst exponent (Hur) and amplitude-aware permutation entropy (AAPE) features were extracted from the EEG dataset. k-nearest neighbors (kNN) and support vector machine (SVM) classification techniques were considered for automatic gender recognition from emotional-based EEGs. The main novelty of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate Hur as a complexity feature and AAPE as an irregularity parameter for the emotional-based EEGs using two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and then integrating these features to propose a new CompEn hybrid feature fusion method towards developing the novel WT_CompEn gender recognition framework as a core for an automated gender recognition model to be sensitive for identifying gender roles in the brain-emotion relationship for females and males. The results illustrated the effectiveness of Hur and AAPE features as remarkable indices for investigating gender-based anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral emotional state. Moreover, the proposed WT_CompEn framework achieved significant enhancement in SVM classification accuracy of 100%, indicating that the novel WT_CompEn may offer a useful way for reliable enhancement of gender recognition of different emotional states. Therefore, the novel WT_CompEn framework is a crucial goal for improving the process of automatic gender recognition from emotional-based EEG signals allowing for more comprehensive insights to understand various gender differences and human behavior effects of an intervention on the brain.

Wavelet Power Spectral Domain Functional Principal Component Analysis for Feature Extraction of Epileptic EEGs

Feature extraction plays an important role in machine learning for signal processing, particularly for low-dimensional data visualization and predictive analytics. Data from real-world complex systems are often high-dimensional, multi-scale, and non-stationary. Extracting key features of this type of data is challenging. This work proposes a novel approach to analyze Epileptic EEG signals using both wavelet power spectra and functional principal component analysis. We focus on how the feature extraction method can help improve the separation of signals in a low-dimensional feature subspace. By transforming EEG signals into wavelet power spectra, the functionality of signals is significantly enhanced. Furthermore, the power spectra transformation makes functional principal component analysis suitable for extracting key signal features. Therefore, we refer to this approach as a double feature extraction method since both wavelet transform and functional PCA are feature extractors. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, we have tested it using a set of publicly available epileptic EEGs and patient-specific, multi-channel EEG signals, for both ictal signals and pre-ictal signals. The obtained results demonstrate that combining wavelet power spectra and functional principal component analysis is promising for feature extraction of epileptic EEGs. Therefore, they can be useful in computer-based medical systems for epilepsy diagnosis and epileptic seizure detection problems.

An Epilepsy Detection Method Using Multiview Clustering Algorithm and Deep Features

The automatic detection of epilepsy is essentially the classification of EEG signals of seizures and nonseizures, and its purpose is to distinguish the different characteristics of seizure brain electrical signals and normal brain electrical signals. In order to improve the effect of automatic detection, this study proposes a new classification method based on unsupervised multiview clustering results. In addition, considering the high-dimensional characteristics of the original data samples, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is introduced to extract the sample features to obtain deep features. The deep feature reduces the sample dimension and increases the sample separability. The main steps of our proposed novel EEG detection method contain the following three steps: first, a multiview FCM clustering algorithm is introduced, and the training samples are used to train the center and weight of each view. Then, the class center and weight of each view obtained by training are used to calculate the view-weighted membership value of the new prediction sample. Finally, the classification label of the new prediction sample is obtained. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect seizures.

EEG epileptic seizure detection and classification based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform and machine learning algorithms

The visual analysis of common neurological disorders such as epileptic seizures in electroencephalography (EEG) is an oversensitive operation and prone to errors, which has motivated the researchers to develop effective automated seizure detection methods. This paper proposes a robust automatic seizure detection method that can establish a veritable diagnosis of these diseases. The proposed method consists of three steps: (i) remove artifact from EEG data using Savitzky-Golay filter and multi-scale principal component analysis (MSPCA), (ii) extract features from EEG signals using signal decomposition representations based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) allowing to overcome the non-linearity and non-stationary of EEG signals, and (iii) allocate the feature vector to the relevant class ( i.e., seizure class "ictal" or free seizure class "interictal") using machine learning techniques such as support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor ( k-NN), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The experimental results were based on two EEG datasets generated from the CHB-MIT database with and without overlapping process. The results obtained have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method that allows achieving a higher classification accuracy rate up to 100% and also outperforms similar state-of-the-art methods.

Electroencephalogram Profiles for Emotion Identification over the Brain Regions Using Spectral, Entropy and Temporal Biomarkers

Identifying emotions has become essential for comprehending varied human behavior during our daily lives. The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been adopted for eliciting information in terms of waveform distribution over the scalp. The rationale behind this work is twofold. First, it aims to propose spectral, entropy and temporal biomarkers for emotion identification. Second, it aims to integrate the spectral, entropy and temporal biomarkers as a means of developing spectro-spatial ( S S ) , entropy-spatial ( E S ) and temporo-spatial ( T S ) emotional profiles over the brain regions. The EEGs of 40 healthy volunteer students from the University of Vienna were recorded while they viewed seven brief emotional video clips. Features using spectral analysis, entropy method and temporal feature were computed. Three stages of two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were undertaken so as to identify the emotional biomarkers and Pearson's correlations were employed to determine the optimal explanatory profiles for emotional detection. The results evidence that the combination of applied spectral, entropy and temporal sets of features may provide and convey reliable biomarkers for identifying S S , E S and T S profiles relating to different emotional states over the brain areas. EEG biomarkers and profiles enable more comprehensive insights into various human behavior effects as an intervention on the brain.

Selection of optimum frequency bands for detection of epileptiform patterns

The significant research effort in the domain of epilepsy has been directed toward the development of an automated seizure detection system. In their usage of the electrophysiological recordings, most of the proposals thus far have followed the conventional practise of employing all frequency bands following signal decomposition as input features for a classifier. Although seemingly powerful, this approach may prove counterproductive since some frequency bins may not carry relevant information about seizure episodes and may, instead, add noise to the classification process thus degrading performance. A key thesis of the work described here is that the selection of frequency subsets may enhance seizure classification rates. Additionally, the authors explore whether a conservative selection of frequency bins can reduce the amount of training data needed for achieving good classification performance. They have found compelling evidence that using spectral components with <25 Hz frequency in scalp electroencephalograms can yield state-of-the-art classification accuracy while reducing training data requirements to just a tenth of those employed by current approaches.

A review on the pattern detection methods for epilepsy seizure detection from EEG signals

Over several years, research had been conducted for the detection of epileptic seizures to support an automatic diagnosis system to comfort the clinicians' encumbrance. In this regard, a number of research papers have been published for the identification of epileptic seizures. A thorough review of all these papers is required. So, an attempt has been made to review on the pattern detection methods for epilepsy seizure detection from EEG signals. More than 150 research papers have been discussed to determine the techniques for detecting epileptic seizures. Further, the literature review confirms that the pattern recognition techniques required to detect epileptic seizures varies across the electroencephalogram (EEG) datasets of different conditions. This is mostly owing to the fact that EEG detected under different conditions have different characteristics. This consecutively necessitates the identification of the pattern recognition technique to efficiently differentiate EEG epileptic data from the EEG data of various conditions.

Feature Extraction of Epileptic EEG using Wavelet Power Spectra and Functional PCA

In this work, we propose a novel approach to analyze Epileptic EEG signals using wavelet power spectra and functional principal component analysis. Both continuous and discrete wavelet power spectra are considered. By transforming EEG signals into power spectra, we significantly enhance the functionality of random signals, which makes functional principal component analysis be a suitable technique for further extracting key signal features. We have tested our proposed method using a set of publicly available epileptic EEG. The obtained results demonstrate that wavelet power spectra and functional principal component analysis are promising for feature extraction of epileptic EEG, and they may be useful for epilepsy diagnosis problem.

Evaluation of time domain features using best feature subsets based on mutual information for detecting epilepsy

In this pattern recognition study of detecting epilepsy, the first time the authors have attempted to use time domain (TD) features such as waveform length (WL), number of zero-crossings (ZC) and number of slope sign changes (SSC) which are extracted from the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for the detecting the epilepsy for University of Bonn datasets and real-time clinical data. The performance of these TD features is studied along with mean absolute value (MAV) which has been attempted by other researchers. The performance of the TD features derived from DWT is studied using naive Bayes (NB) and support vector machines (SVM) for five different datasets from University of Bonn with 14 different combinations datasets and 24 patients datasets from Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH), India database. Using feature selection and feature ranking based on the estimation of mutual information (MI), the significant features required for the classifier to get higher accuracy is obtained. Further, NB achieves 100% classification accuracy (CA) in distinguishing normal eyes open and epileptic dataset with top 4 ranked features and it gives 100% accuracy with top-ranked two features in using CMCH data.

Grasshopper optimization algorithm-based approach for the optimization of ensemble classifier and feature selection to classify epileptic EEG signals

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disease worldwide. It is diagnosed by analyzing a long electroencephalogram (EEG) recording in a clinical environment, which may be much prone to errors and a time-consuming task. In this paper, a methodology for the classification of an epileptic seizure is proposed for analyzing EEG signals. EEG signal is decomposed into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using empirical mode decomposition (EMD). A fusion, of the extracted non-linear and spike-based features from each of the IMF signals, is made. The parameters of five machine learning algorithms; k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), extreme learning machine (ELM), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and artificial neural network (ANN) are optimized, as well as a set of the significant features is chosen using grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA). These classifiers with their optimized parameters are ensembled together for the classification of epileptic seizures. The results show that ensemble classifier performs better than individual classifier. A comparison of the proposed methodology with state of the art epileptic seizure detection techniques is also made for validation. Graphical abstract ᅟ.

Epilepsy detection from EEG signals: a review

Over many decades, research is being attempted for the detection of epileptic seizure to support for automatic diagnosis system to help clinicians from burdensome work. In this respect, an enormous number of research papers is published for identification of epileptic seizure. It is difficult to present a detailed review of all these literature. Therefore, in this paper, an attempt has been made to review the detection of an epileptic seizure. More than 100 research papers have been discussed to discern the techniques for detecting the epileptic seizure. Further, the literature survey shows that the pattern recognition required to detect epileptic seizure varies with different conditions of EEG datasets. This is mainly due to the fact that EEG detected under different conditions has different characteristics. This is, in turn, necessitates the identification of pattern recognition technique to effectively distinguish EEG epileptic data from a various condition of EEG data.

Seizure forecasting using single robust linear feature as correlation vector of seizure-like events in brain slices preparation in vitro

OBJECTIVE

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder affecting 50 million individuals globally. Modern research has inspected the likelihood of forecasting epileptic seizures. Algorithmic investigations are giving promising results for seizure prediction. Though mostly seizure prediction algorithm uses pre-ictal (prodromal symptoms) events for prediction. On the contrary, prodromal symptoms may not necessarily be present in every patient or subject. This paper focuses on seizure forecasting regardless of the presence of pre-ictal (prodromal symptoms) using the single robust feature with maximum accuracy. Method: We evaluated datasets having 4-aminopydine induced seizure-like events rat's hippocampa slices and cortical tissue from pharmacoresistant epilepsy patients. The proposed methodology applies the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) at levels 1-5 utilizing 'Daubechies-4'. Linear Discriminant classifier (LDC), Quadratic Discriminant Classifier (QDC) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were used to classify each signal using eight discriminative features. Results: Classifier performance was assessed by parameters like true detections (TD), false detection (FD), accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPF), and positive predicted value (PPC), negative predicted value (NPV). Highest classification feature was selected as a seizure forecasting correlation vector and decision rule was formulated for seizure forecasting. Correlation vector served as a forecaster for current EEG activity. Proposed decision rule forecasted ongoing signal activity towards possible seizure condition true or false. The suggested framework revealed forecasting of ictal events at 10 seconds before the actual seizure. Conclusion: It is worth mentioning that the proposed study utilized a single linear feature to predict seizures precisely. Moreover, utilization of single feature encouraged in subsiding system complexity, processing delays, and system latency.

Wavelet-based feature extraction for classification of epileptic seizure EEG signal

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal-processing techniques are the prominent role in the detection and prediction of epileptic seizures. The detection of epileptic activity is cumbersome and needs a detailed analysis of the EEG data. Therefore, an efficient method for classifying EEG data is required. In this work, a constructive pattern recognition strategy for analysing EEG data as normal and epileptic seizure has been proposed. With this strategy, the signals were decomposed into frequency sub-bands using discrete wavelet transform (DWT). principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are applied to reduce the dimensionality of EEG data. These reduced features were used as input to Naïve Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbour Classifier to classify normal or epileptic seizure signal. The performance of classifier was evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The experimental results show that PCA with Naïve Bayes classifier provides 98.6% accuracy and LDA with Naïve Bayes classifier attains improved result of 99.8% accuracy. Also, the result shows that PCA, LDA with K-NN achieves 98.5% and 100% accuracy. This evaluation is used to propose a reliable, practical epilepsy detection method to enhance the patient's care and quality of life.

Absence seizure susceptibility correlates with pre-ictal β oscillations

Absence seizures are generalized, cortico-thalamo-cortical (CTC) high power electroencephalographic (EEG) or electrocorticographic (ECoG) events that initiate and terminate suddenly. ECoG recordings of absence seizures in animal models of genetic absence epilepsy show a sudden spike-wave-discharge (SWD) onset that rapidly emerges from normal ECoG activity. However, given that absence seizures occur most often during periods of drowsiness or quiet wakefulness, we wondered whether SWD onset correlates with pre-ictal changes in network activity. To address this, we analyzed ECoG recordings of both spontaneous and induced SWDs in rats with genetic absence epilepsy. We discovered that the duration and intensity of spontaneous SWDs positively correlate with pre-ictal 20-40Hz (β) spectral power and negatively correlate with 4-7Hz (Ø) power. In addition, the output of thalamocortical neurons decreases within the same pre-ictal window of time. In separate experiments we found that the propensity for SWD induction was correlated with pre-ictal β power. These results argue that CTC networks undergo a pre-seizure state transition, possibly due to a functional reorganization of cortical microcircuits, which leads to the generation of absence seizures.

Symbolic time series analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) epileptic seizure and brain dynamics with eye-open and eye-closed subjects during resting states

Objective

Epilepsy is a neuronal disorder for which the electrical discharge in the brain is synchronized, abnormal and excessive. To detect the epileptic seizures and to analyse brain activities during different mental states, various methods in non-linear dynamics have been proposed. This study is an attempt to quantify the complexity of control and epileptic subject with and without seizure as well as to distinguish eye-open (EO) and eye-closed (EC) conditions using threshold-based symbolic entropy.

Methods

The threshold-dependent symbolic entropy was applied to distinguish the healthy and epileptic subjects with seizure and seizure-free intervals (i.e. interictal and ictal) as well as to distinguish EO and EC conditions. The original time series data was converted into symbol sequences using quantization level, and word series of symbol sequences was generated using a word length of three or more. Then, normalized corrected Shannon entropy (NCSE) was computed to quantify the complexity. The NCSE values were not following the normal distribution, and the non-parametric Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon (MWW) test was used to find significant differences among various groups at 0.05 significance level. The values of NCSE were presented in a form of topographic maps to show significant brain regions during EC and EO conditions. The results of the study were compared to those of the multiscale entropy (MSE).

Results

The results indicated that the dynamics of healthy subjects are more complex compared to epileptic subjects (during seizure and seizure-free intervals) in both EO and EC conditions. The comparison of the dynamics of epileptic subjects revealed that seizure-free intervals are more complex than seizure intervals. The dynamics of healthy subjects during EO conditions are more complex compared to those during EC conditions. Further, the results clearly demonstrated that threshold-dependent symbolic entropy outperform MSE in distinguishing different physiological and pathological conditions.

Conclusion

The threshold symbolic entropy has provided improved accuracy in quantifying the dynamics of healthy and epileptic subjects during EC an EO conditions for each electrode compared to the MSE.

Visibility Graph from Adaptive Optimal Kernel Time-Frequency Representation for Classification of Epileptiform EEG

Detecting epileptic seizure from EEG signals constitutes a challenging problem of significant importance. Combining adaptive optimal kernel time-frequency representation and visibility graph, we develop a novel method for detecting epileptic seizure from EEG signals. We construct complex networks from EEG signals recorded from healthy subjects and epilepsy patients. Then we employ clustering coefficient, clustering coefficient entropy and average degree to characterize the topological structure of the networks generated from different brain states. In addition, we combine energy deviation and network measures to recognize healthy subjects and epilepsy patients, and further distinguish brain states during seizure free interval and epileptic seizures. Three different experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of our method. The results suggest that our method allows a high-accurate classification of epileptiform EEG signals.

AN ANALYSIS OF TWO COMMON REFERENCE POINTS FOR EEGS

Clinical electroencephalographic (EEG) data varies significantly depending on a number of operational conditions (e.g., the type and placement of electrodes, the type of electrical grounding used). This investigation explores the statistical differences present in two different referential montages: Linked Ear (LE) and Averaged Reference (AR). Each of these accounts for approximately 45% of the data in the TUH EEG Corpus. In this study, we explore the impact this variability has on machine learning performance. We compare the statistical properties of features generated using these two montages, and explore the impact of performance on our standard Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based classification system. We show that a system trained on LE data significantly outperforms one trained only on AR data (77.2% vs. 61.4%). We also demonstrate that performance of a system trained on both data sets is somewhat compromised (71.4% vs. 77.2%). A statistical analysis of the data suggests that mean, variance and channel normalization should be considered. However, cepstral mean subtraction failed to produce an improvement in performance, suggesting that the impact of these statistical differences is subtler.

A Follow-Up Study on the Renal Protective Efficacy of Telbivudine for Hepatitis B Virus-Infected Taiwanese Patients After Living Donor Liver Transplant

OBJECTIVES

Preservation of renal function is an important issue after living donor liver transplant. We aimed to examine the renal protective efficacy of telbivudine in hepatitis B virus-infected patients after living donor liver transplant.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

In this retrospective study, we compared 18 patients who received telbivudine 600 mg once per day and 23 patients who received entecavir 1 mg once per day after living donor liver transplant. Clinical data were obtained through chart review and included Model for End-Stage Liver Disease score and pre- and postoperative aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, and creatinine levels and estimated glomerular filtration rate.

RESULTS

Posttransplant estimated glomerular filtration rates and creatinine levels were calculated, and improvement of renal function was found in the group of patients who received telbivudine. Significant improvements were shown in estimated glomerular filtration rates started after 9 months of administration and creatinine levels after 12 months compared with patients who received entecavir.

CONCLUSIONS

In our study, long-term telbivudine therapy is associated with a sustained improvement of renal function in patients with hepatitis B virus infection after living donor liver transplant.

Detection of epileptic seizure in EEG signals using linear least squares preprocessing

An epileptic seizure is a transient event of abnormal excessive neuronal discharge in the brain. This unwanted event can be obstructed by detection of electrical changes in the brain that happen before the seizure takes place. The automatic detection of seizures is necessary since the visual screening of EEG recordings is a time consuming task and requires experts to improve the diagnosis. Much of the prior research in detection of seizures has been developed based on artificial neural network, genetic programming, and wavelet transforms. Although the highest achieved accuracy for classification is 100%, there are drawbacks, such as the existence of unbalanced datasets and the lack of investigations in performances consistency. To address these, four linear least squares-based preprocessing models are proposed to extract key features of an EEG signal in order to detect seizures. The first two models are newly developed. The original signal (EEG) is approximated by a sinusoidal curve. Its amplitude is formed by a polynomial function and compared with the predeveloped spline function. Different statistical measures, namely classification accuracy, true positive and negative rates, false positive and negative rates and precision, are utilised to assess the performance of the proposed models. These metrics are derived from confusion matrices obtained from classifiers. Different classifiers are used over the original dataset and the set of extracted features. The proposed models significantly reduce the dimension of the classification problem and the computational time while the classification accuracy is improved in most cases. The first and third models are promising feature extraction methods with the classification accuracy of 100%. Logistic, LazyIB1, LazyIB5, and J48 are the best classifiers. Their true positive and negative rates are 1 while false positive and negative rates are 0 and the corresponding precision values are 1. Numerical results suggest that these models are robust and efficient for detecting epileptic seizure.

Review of Sparse Representation-Based Classification Methods on EEG Signal Processing for Epilepsy Detection, Brain-Computer Interface and Cognitive Impairment

At present, the sparse representation-based classification (SRC) has become an important approach in electroencephalograph (EEG) signal analysis, by which the data is sparsely represented on the basis of a fixed dictionary or learned dictionary and classified based on the reconstruction criteria. SRC methods have been used to analyze the EEG signals of epilepsy, cognitive impairment and brain computer interface (BCI), which made rapid progress including the improvement in computational accuracy, efficiency and robustness. However, these methods have deficiencies in real-time performance, generalization ability and the dependence of labeled sample in the analysis of the EEG signals. This mini review described the advantages and disadvantages of the SRC methods in the EEG signal analysis with the expectation that these methods can provide the better tools for analyzing EEG signals.

EEG seizure detection and epilepsy diagnosis using a novel variation of Empirical Mode Decomposition

Epileptic seizure detection and epilepsy diagnosis based on feature extraction and classification using electroencephalography (EEG) signals is an important area of research. In this paper, we present a simple and effective approach based on signal decomposition, using a novel variation of the Empirical Mode Decomposition called Empirical Mode Decomposition-Modified Peak Selection (EMD-MPS). EMD-MPS allows time-scale based de-trending of signals, allowing signals to be separated directly into a de-trended component, and a trend, according to a frequency separation criterion. Features are extracted from the decomposed components, and a simple classifier, namely the 1-NN classifier is used for three classification tasks. The technique is tested on a publicly available EEG database, and a classification accuracy of 99% for epilepsy diagnosis task, and 100% and 98.2% for two seizure detection tasks is obtained. These results are better than, or comparable to previous results using the same EEG database, but have been obtained with a simpler and computationally fast signal analysis and classification method.

Statistics corner: A guide to appropriate use of correlation coefficient in medical research

Correlation is a statistical method used to assess a possible linear association between two continuous variables. It is simple both to calculate and to interpret. However, misuse of correlation is so common among researchers that some statisticians have wished that the method had never been devised at all. The aim of this article is to provide a guide to appropriate use of correlation in medical research and to highlight some misuse. Examples of the applications of the correlation coefficient have been provided using data from statistical simulations as well as real data. Rule of thumb for interpreting size of a correlation coefficient has been provided.