A Novel Approach for Real-Time Recognition of Epileptic Seizures Using Minimum Variance Modified Fuzzy Entropy

Validation of epileptic seizures annotations from long-term electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings is a tough and tedious task for the neurological community. It is a well-known fact that computerized qualitative methods thoroughly assess the complex brain dynamics toward seizure detection and proven as one of the acceptable clinical indicators.

This research study suggests a novel approach for real-time recognition of epileptic seizure from EEG recordings by a technique referred as minimum variance modified fuzzy entropy (MVMFzEn). Multichannel EEG recordings of 4.36 h of epileptic seizures and 25.74 h of normal EEG were considered. Signal processing techniques such as filters and independent component analysis were appropriated to reduce noise and artifacts. Unlike, the predefined fuzzy membership function, the modified fuzzy entropy utilizes relative energy as a membership function followed by scaling operation to obtain the feature.

Results revealed that MVMFzEn drops abruptly during an epileptic activity and this fact was used to set a threshold. An automated threshold derived from MVMFzEn assesses the classification efficiency of the given data during validation. It was observed from the results that the proposed method yields a classification accuracy of 100% without the use of any classifier.

The graphical user interface was designed in MATLAB to automatically label the normal and epileptic segments in the long-term EEG recordings.

The ground truth clinical validation using validation specificity and validation sensitivity confirms the suitability of the proposed technique for automated annotation of epileptic seizures in real time.