Recognition of epileptic seizures in EEG records: A transfer learning approach

Seizure is a transient phenomenon with genesis in excessive abnormal or synchronous neuronal electrical activity in the brain, while epilepsy is defined as a brain dysfunction characterized by persistent predisposition to generate seizures. The identification of epileptogenic electroencephalographic patterns can be performed using machine learning.The present study aimed to develop a transfer learning based classifier able to detect epileptic seizures in images generated from electroencephalographic data graphic representation.

We used the Epileptic Seizure Recognition Data Set,which consists of 500 brain activity records for 23.6 seconds comprising 23 chunks of 178 data points, and transformed the resulting 11500 instances into images by graphically plotting its data points. Those images were then splittedin training and test set and used to build and assess, respectively, a transfer learning-based deep neural network, which classified the images according the presence or absence of epileptic seizures.

The model achieved 100% accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, with AUC-score of 1.0, demonstrating the great potential of transfer learning for the analysis of graphically represented electroencephalographic data.

It is opportune to raise new studies involving transfer learning for the analysis of signal data, with the aim of improving, disseminating and validating its use for daily clinical practice.