Transfer-Learning for Automated Seizure Detection Based on Electric Field Encephalography Reconstructed Signal

Building an automatic seizure onset prediction model based on multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) signals has been a hot topic in computer science and neuroscience field for a long time. In this research, we collect EEG data from different epilepsy patients and EEG devices and reconstruct and combine the EEG signals using an innovative electric field encephalography (EFEG) method, which establishes a virtual electric field vector, enabling extraction of electric field components and increasing detection accuracy compared to the conventional method. We extract a number of important features from the reconstructed signals and pass them through an ensemble model based on support vector machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. By applying this EFEG channel combination method, we can achieve the highest detection accuracy at 87% which is 6% to 17% higher than the conventional channel averaging combination method. Meanwhile, to reduce the potential overfitting problem caused by DNN models on a small dataset and limited training patient, we ensemble the DNN model with two “weaker” classifiers to ensure the best performance in model transferring for different patients. Based on these methods, we can achieve the highest detection accuracy at 82% on a new patient using a different EEG device. Thus, we believe our method has good potential to be applied on different commercial and clinical devices.