Detection of preictal state in epileptic seizures using ensemble classifier

Epilepsy affected patient experiences more than one frequency seizures which can not be treated with medication or surgical procedures in 30% of the cases. Therefore, an early prediction of these seizures is inevitable for these cases to control them with therapeutic interventions.

In recent years, researchers have proposed multiple deep learning based methods for detection of preictal state in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, however, accurate detection of start of preictal state remains a challenge. We propose a novel ensemble classifier based method that gets the comprehensive feature set as input and combines three different classifiers to detect the preictal state.

We have applied the proposed method on the publicly available scalp EEG dataset CHBMIT of 22 subjects. An average accuracy of 94.31% with sensitivity and specificity of 94.73% and 93.72% respectively has been achieved with the method proposed in this study.

Proposed study utilizes the preprocessing techniques for noise removal, combines deep learning based and handcrafted features and an ensemble classifier for detection of start of preictal state. Proposed method gives better results in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.