Combining EEG Features and Convolutional Autoencoder for Neonatal Seizure Detection

Neonatal epilepsy is a common emergency phenomenon in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), which requires timely attention, early identification, and treatment. Traditional detection methods mostly use supervised learning with enormous labeled data. Hence, this study offers a semi-supervised hybrid architecture for detecting seizures, which combines the extracted electroencephalogram (EEG) feature dataset and convolutional autoencoder, called Fd-CAE. First, various features in the time domain and entropy domain are extracted to characterize the EEG signal, which helps distinguish epileptic seizures subsequently. Then, the unlabeled EEG features are fed into the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) for training, which effectively represents EEG features by optimizing the loss between the input and output features. This unsupervised feature learning process can better combine and optimize EEG features from unlabeled data. After that, the pre-trained encoder part of the model is used for further feature learning of labeled data to obtain its low-dimensional feature representation and achieve classification. This model is performed on the neonatal EEG dataset collected at the University of Helsinki Hospital, which has a high discriminative ability to detect seizures, with an accuracy of 92.34%, precision of 93.61%, recall rate of 98.74%, and F1-score of 95.77%, respectively. The results show that unsupervised learning by CAE is beneficial to the characterization of EEG signals, and the proposed Fd-CAE method significantly improves classification performance.