Learning Robust Representations of Tonic-Clonic Seizures With Cyclic Transformer

Tonic-clonic seizures (TCSs) pose a significant risk for sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Previous research has highlighted the potential of multimodal wearable seizure detection systems in accurately detecting TCSs through continuous monitoring, enabling timely alarms and potentially preventing SUDEP. However, such multimodal systems carry a higher risk of sensor malfunction. In this paper, we propose a cyclic transformer approach to address these challenges. The cyclic transformer learns a robust representation by performing circular modal translations between the source and target modalities. It leverages back-translation as regularization technique to enhance the discriminative power of the learned representation. Notably, the proposed cyclic transformer is trained on paired multimodal data but requires only a single source modality during deployment. This characteristic ensures the robustness of the cyclic transformer to perturbations or missing information in the target modality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed cyclic transformer achieves competitive performance compared with existing multimodal systems. While both approaches were trained using EEG and EMG data, the cyclic transformer exclusively employs EEG data for testing, diverging from the state-of-the-art's utilization of both EEG and EMG data during test. This showcases the effectiveness of the cyclic transformer in multimodal TCSs detection, offering a promising approach for enhancing the accuracy and robustness of seizure detection systems while mitigating the risks associated with sensor malfunction.