Improving the generalization of patient non-specific model for epileptic seizure detection

Epilepsy is the second most common neurological disorder characterized by recurrent and unpredictable seizures. Accurate seizure detection is important for diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy. Many researches achieved good performance on patient-specific seizure detection. However, they were tailored to each specific individual which are less applicable clinically than the patient non-specific detection, which lacked good performance. Despite several decades of research on automatic seizure detection, seizure detection is currently still based on visual inspection of video-EEG (Electroencephalogram) in clinical setting. It is time consuming and prone to human error and subjectivity. This study aims to improve patient non-specific seizure detection to assist neurologist with efficient and objective evaluation of epileptic EEG. The clinical data used was from the open access Siena Scalp EEG Database which consists of 14 patients. First the data were pre-processed to remove artifacts and noises. Second the features from time domain, frequency domain and entropy were extracted from each channel and then concatenated into a feature vector. Finally, a machine learning approach based on random forest was employed for seizure detection with leave-one-patient-out cross-validation scheme. Automatic seizure detection was carried out with the trained model. The study achieved a specificity of 99.38%, sensitivity of 81.43% and 3.61 FP/h (False Positives per hour), which outperformed some other patient non-specific detectors found in literature. The findings from the study shows the possibility of clinical application of automatic seizure detection and indicate that further work should focus on dealing with reducing false positives.