Prediction of epileptic seizures from EEG using analysis of ictal rules on Poincaré plane

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that causes recurrent and abrupt seizures which makes the patients insecure. Predicting seizures can reduce the burdens of this disorder.

A new approach in seizure prediction is presented that includes a novel technique in feature extraction from EEG. The algorithm firsts creates an embedding space from EEG time series. Then it takes samples with most of the information using an optimized and data specific Poincare plane. In order to quantify small dynamics on the Poincare plane, based on the order of locations of Poincaré samples in the sequence, 64 fuzzy rules in each channel are defined. Features are extracted based on the frequency distribution of these fuzzy rules in each minute. Then features with higher variance are selected as ictal features and again reduced using PCA. Finally, in order to evaluate how these innovative features can increase the performance of the seizure prediction algorithm, the transition from interictal to preictal state is scored utilizing SVM.

The algorithm is tested on 460 h of EEG from 19 patients of Freiburg dataset who had at least 3 seizures. Considering maximum Seizure Prediction Horizon of 42 minutes, average sensitivity was 91.8 - 96.6% and average false prediction rate was 0.05 - 0.08/h.

The presented algorithm shows a better performance and more robustness compare to most of existing methods, and shows power in extracting optimal features from EEG.