Short-horizon neonatal seizure prediction using EEG-based deep learning

Strategies to predict neonatal seizure risk have typically focused on long-term static predictions with prediction horizons spanning days during the acute postnatal period. Higher temporal resolution or short-horizon neonatal seizure prediction, on the time-frame of minutes, remains unexplored. Here, we investigated quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) based deep learning (DL) for short-horizon seizure prediction. We used two publicly available EEG seizure datasets with a total of 132 neonates containing a total of 281 hours of EEG data. We benchmarked current state-of-the-art time-series DL methods for seizure prediction, identifying convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) as having the strongest performance at preictal state classification. We assessed ConvLSTM performance in a seizure alarm system over varying short-range (1-7 minutes) seizure prediction horizons (SPH) and seizure occurrence periods (SOP) and identified optimal performance at SPH 3 min and SOP 7 min, with AUROC 0.8. At 80% sensitivity, false detection rate was 0.68 events/hour with time-in-warning of 0.36. Model calibration was moderate, with an expected calibration error of 0.106. These findings establish the feasibility of short-horizon neonatal seizure prediction and warrant the need for further validation.