Epileptic Seizure Detection in Clinical EEGs Using an XGboost-based Method

Epilepsy is one of the most common serious disorders of the brain, affecting about 50 million people worldwide. Electroencephalography (EEG) is an electrophysiological monitoring method which is used to measure tiny electrical changes of the brain, and it is frequently used to diagnose epilepsy. However, the visual annotation of EEG traces is time-consuming and typically requires experienced experts. Therefore, automatic seizure detection can help to reduce the time required to annotate EEGs. Automatic detection of seizures in clinical EEGs has been limited-to date. In this study, we present an XGBoost-based method to detect seizures in EEGs from the TUH-EEG Corpus. 4,597 EEG files were used to train the method, 1,013 EEGs were used as a validation set, and 1,026 EEG files were used to test the method. Sixty-four features were selected as the input to the training set, and Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique was used to balance the dataset. Our XGBoost-based method achieved sensitivity and false alarm/24 hours of 20.00% and 15.59, respectively, in the test set. The proposed XGBoost-based method has the potential to help researchers automatically analyse seizures in clinical EEG recordings.