Interictal Epileptiform Discharge Detection Using Dual-Domain Features and GAN

Interictal Epileptiform Discharge is essential for identifying epilepsy. However, the unpredictable and non-stationary nature of electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns poses considerable challenges for reliable identification. Manual interpretation of EEG is subjective and time-consuming. With advancements in machine learning and deep learning, computer-aided approaches for automated IED detection have been rapidly developed. The state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have shown promising results but struggle to capture long-term dependencies in time-series data. In contrast, Transformer excels at modeling sequential information through self-attention mechanisms, overcoming the CNN limitations. This study proposes an IED Detector (IEDD) that integrates convolutional layers and a Transformer to detect IEDs. The IEDD initially employs convolutional layers to extract local features of IEDs, followed by a Transformer to model long-term dependencies. To further extract spatial features, EEG data are represented as a three-dimensional tensor with embedded channel topology, where a CNN captures spatial features at each sampling point and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network models their temporal evolution. Additionally, due to the scarcity of IED data, a novel Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is developed to augment the IED dataset. Experimental results show the proposed approach achieves an average accuracy of 96.11% on the augmented Dataset 1 and 95.25% on Dataset 2 for binary classification, with an average sensitivity of 87.26% and precision of 89.96% for multi-label classification. These findings provide valuable insights into advancing deep learning and Transformer-based approaches for automated IED detection.