Sparse knowledge sharing (SKS) for privacy-preserving domain incremental seizure detection

Objective. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects millions of patients worldwide. Electroencephalogram-based seizure detection plays a crucial role in its timely diagnosis and effective monitoring. However, due to distribution shifts in patient data, existing seizure detection approaches are often patient-specific, which requires customized models for different patients. This paper considers privacy-preserving domain incremental learning (PP-DIL), where the model learns sequentially from each domain (patient) while only accessing the current domain data and previously trained models. This scenario has three main challenges: (1) catastrophic forgetting of previous domains, (2) privacy protection of previous domains, and (3) distribution shifts among domains.Approach. We propose a sparse knowledge sharing (SKS) approach. First, Euclidean alignment is employed to align data from different domains. Then, we propose an adaptive pruning approach for SKS to allocate subnet for each domain adaptively, allowing specific parameters to learn domain-specific knowledge while shared parameters to preserve knowledge from previous domains. Additionally, supervised contrastive learning is employed to enhance the model's ability to distinguish relevant features.Main Results. Experiments on two public seizure datasets demonstrated that SKS achieved superior performance in PP-DIL.Significance. SKS is a rehearsal-free privacy-preserving approach that effectively learns new domains while minimizing the impact on previously learned domains, achieving a better balance between plasticity and stability.