How good are we at diagnosing seizures based on semiology?

The accuracy of visual diagnosis of seizures based on semiologic features among different health care professionals is largely unknown. We evaluated the ability of health care professionals to correctly diagnose epileptic seizures (ES) and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) from a random selection of 10 ES and 10 PNES videos. The 20 videos (without accompanying electroencephalography) were shown only once, in a random mix to different groups of health care professionals. These individuals, blinded to the diagnosis, were asked to classify the seizure as ES or PNES. We used summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curves to determine the accuracy for each group. Next we calculated the difference between the area under the curve (AUC) of SROC between neurologists (as the reference) and the other groups of health care professionals. Neurologists achieved significantly higher AUC results compared to other health care professionals. These results indicate a wide range of diagnostic accuracy among different health care professionals and have practical implications for the evaluation of patients with seizure disorders in acute settings.