Machine learning based intelligent automated neonatal epileptic seizure detection

Abstract

Epilepsy is found to be the fourth most common chronic neurological disorder that tends to abnormal and unpredictable brain activity and seizure states. According to statistics, 70% of the epilepsy patients can be cured if identified and treated with anti-epileptic drugs or shock stimulations. Only about 7% to 8% need to be operated. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a cheap and effective way to record the prolonged activities of the brain through electrical impulses between neural cells. Seizure is difficult to detect in neonates as the signal involves a lot of disturbances and the existing high accuracy system for adults can’t be used for neonates. In an attempt to build an impregnable system to detect seizure in early stages, EEG signals of neonates procured from Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Helsinki University Hospital. These signals were processed and fed into three different robust algorithms –Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN). The experimental results were compared and the proposed CNN model with 95.99% accuracy outperforms all the state-of-art models for automated Epileptic Seizure prediction in Neonates. Deep CNN has been a powerful tool in extracting robust features from EEG signals. This generalized system can be used by medical experts for detecting Seizure in neonates with better accuracy and reliability.