An automatic patient-specific seizure onset detection method using intracranial electroencephalography

This study presents a multichannel patient-specific seizure detection method based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and support vector machine (SVM) classifier.

The EMD is used to extract features from intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). A machine-learning algorithm is used as a classifier to discriminate between seizure and nonseizure intracranial EEG epochs. A postprocessing algorithm is proposed to reject artifacts and increase the robustness of the method. The proposed method was evaluated using 463 hours of intracranial EEG recordings from 17 patients with a total of 51 seizures in the Freiburg EEG database.

The proposed method had better performance than most of the existing seizure detection systems, including an average sensitivity of 92%, false detection rate (FDR) of 0.17/hour, and time delay (TD) of 12 sec. Moreover, the FDR could be further reduced by a TD extension.

Given its high sensitivity and low FDR, the proposed patient-specific seizure detection method can greatly assist clinical staff with automatically marking seizures in long-term EEG or detecting seizure onset online with high performance. Early and accurate seizure detection using this method may serve as a practical tool for planning epilepsy interventions.