Using Relevance Feedback to Distinguish the Changes in EEG During Different Absence Seizure Phases

We carried out a series of statistical experiments to explore the utility of using relevance feedback on electroencephalogram (EEG) data to distinguish between different activity states in human absence epilepsy. EEG recordings from 10 patients with absence epilepsy are sampled, filtered, selected, and dissected from seizure-free, preseizure, and seizure phases. A total of 112 two-second 19-channel EEG epochs from 10 patients were selected from each phase. For each epoch, multiscale permutation entropy of the EEG data was calculated. The feature dimensionality was reduced by linear discriminant analysis to obtain a more discriminative and compact representation. Finally, a relevance feedback technique, that is, direct biased discriminant analysis, was applied to 68 randomly selected queries over nine iterations. This study is a first attempt to apply the statistical analysis of relevance feedback to the distinction of different EEG activity states in absence epilepsy. The average precision in the top 10 returned results was 97.5%, and the standard deviation suggested that embedding relevance feedback can effectively distinguish different seizure phases in absence epilepsy. The experimental results indicate that relevance feedback may be an effective tool for the prediction of different activity states in human absence epilepsy. The simultaneous analysis of multichannel EEG signals provides a powerful tool for the exploration of abnormal electrical brain activity in patients with epilepsy.