Epileptic Seizure Detection With a Reduced Montage: A Way Forward for Ambulatory EEG Devices

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the fundamental tools for analyzing the behavior of brain and particularly helpful for treatment of epilepsy and detection of associated seizures. For long-term recording of EEG signals, current research is heading towards simple, unobtrusive and ambulatory devices with a small number of channels. The primary contribution of this paper is to assess the performance difference between the seizure detection results using features from all channels versus only the channels in/around the temporal region. For this purpose, we develop a supervised seizure detection algorithm that uses time domain features extracted sequentially for every 1-second epoch. By using this algorithm, we obtained sensitivity values of 0.95 and 0.92, specificity values of 0.99 and 0.99 and false positive per hour values as 0.16 and 0.21 for all 23 channels and 10 temporal region channels, respectively. These results show that restricting the EEG analysis to temporal region results only in a graceful and gradual degradation of classifier performance. We conclude that EEG ambulatory devices with a montage local to the temporal region could demonstrate satisfactory performance. This presents a promising way forward for the use of ambulatory devices with compact wearable design.