BHI-Net: Brain-Heart Interaction-Based Deep Architectures for Epileptic Seizures and Firing Location Detection

Automatic detection of epileptic seizures is still a challenging problem due to the intolerance of EEG. Introducing ECG can help with EEG for detecting seizures. However, the existing methods depended on fusing either the extracted features or the classification results of EEG-only and ECG-only with ignoring the interaction between them, so the detection rate did not improve much. Also, all EEG channels were considered in a complex manner. Moreover, the detection of epilepsy firing location, which is an important issue for diagnosing epilepsy, is not considered before. Therefore, we propose a new method based on the brain-heart interaction (BHI) for detecting the seizure onset and its firing location in the brain with lower complexity and better performance. BHI allows us to study the nonlinear coupling and variation of phase-synchronization between brain regions and heart activity, which are effective for distinguishing seizures. In our method, the EEG channels are mapped into two surrogate channels to reduce the computational complexity. Moreover, the firing location detector is triggered only once the seizure is detected to save the system’s power. Evaluation using different proposed classification networks based on the TUSZ, the largest available EEG/ECG dataset with 315 subjects and 7 seizure types, showed that our BHI method improves the sensitivity by 48% with only 4 false alarms/24h compared to using only EEG. Moreover, it outperforms the performance of the average human detector based on the quantitative EEG tools by achieving a sensitivity of 68.2% with 11.9 false alarms/ 24h and a latency of 11.94 sec.