Combination of EEG Complexity and Spectral Analysis for Epilepsy Diagnosis and Seizure Detection

Approximately 1% of the world’s population has epilepsy, and 25% of epilepsy patients cannot be treated sufficiently by any available therapy. If an automatic seizure-detection system was available, it could reduce the time required by a neurologist to perform an off-line diagnosis by reviewing electroencephalogram (EEG) data. It could produce an on-line warning signal to alert healthcare professionals or to drive a treatment device such as an electrical stimulator to enhance the patient’s safety and quality of life. This paper describes a systematic evaluation of current approaches to seizure detection in the literature. This evaluation was then used to suggest a reliable, practical epilepsy detection method. The combination of complexity analysis and spectrum analysis on an EEG can perform robust evaluations on the collected data. Principle component analysis (PCA) and genetic algorithms (GAs) were applied to various linear and nonlinear methods. The best linear models resulted from using all of the features without other processing. For the nonlinear models, applying PCA for feature reduction provided better results than applying GAs. The feasibility of executing the proposed methods on a personal computer for on-line processing was also demonstrated.