Deep Classification of Epileptic Signals

Electrophysiological observation plays a major role in epilepsy evaluation. However, human interpretation of brain signals is subjective and prone to misdiagnosis. Automating this process, especially seizure detection relying on scalp-based Electroencephalography (EEG) and intracranial EEG, has been the focus of research over recent decades. Nevertheless, its numerous challenges have inhibited a definitive solution. Inspired by recent advances in deep learning, here we describe a new classification approach for EEG time series based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) via the use of Long- Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed deep network effectively learns and models discriminative temporal patterns from EEG sequential data. Especially, the features are automatically discovered from the raw EEG data without any pre-processing step, eliminating humans from laborious feature design task. Our light-weight system has a low computational complexity and reduced memory requirement for large training datasets. On a public dataset, a multi-fold cross-validation scheme of the proposed architecture exhibited an average validation accuracy of 95.54% and an average AUC of 0.9582 of the ROC curve among all sets defined in the experiment. This work reinforces the benefits of deep learning to be further attended in clinical applications and neuroscientific research.