Towards Automated EEG-Based Epilepsy Detection Using Deep Convolutional Autoencoders

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders. This disease requires reliable and efficient seizure detection methods. Electroencephalography (EEG) is the gold standard for seizure monitoring, but its manual analysis is a time-consuming task that requires expert knowledge. In addition, there are no well-defined features that allow fully automated analysis. Existing deep learning-based approaches struggle to achieve high sensitivity while maintaining a low false alarm rate per hour (FAR/h) and lack consistency in the optimal EEG input representation, whether in the time or frequency domain. To address these issues, we propose a Deep Convolutional Autoencoder (DCAE) to extract low-dimensional latent representations that preserve essential EEG signal features. The ability of the model to preserve relevant information was evaluated by comparing reconstruction errors based on both time series and frequency-domain representations. Several autoencoders with different loss functions based on time and frequency were trained and evaluated to determine their effectiveness in reconstructing EEG features. Our results show that the DCAE model taking both time series and frequency losses into account achieved the best reconstruction performance. This indicates that Deep Neural Networks with a single representation might not preserve the relevant signal properties. This work provides insight into how deep learning models process EEG data and examines whether frequency information is captured when time series signals are used as input.