Author

Author information

1
Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
2
Department of Pediatrics, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
3
Department of Medical Imaging and Radiological Sciences, College of Health Sciences, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
4
Department of Computer and Communication, National Pingtung University, Pingtung, Taiwan.
5
Department of Pediatrics, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan.
6
Department of Information Engineering, I-Shou University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Abstract

The life quality of patients with refractory epilepsy is extremely affected by abrupt and unpredictable seizures. A reliable method for predicting seizures is important in the management of refractory epilepsy. A critical factor in seizure prediction involves the classification of the preictal and interictal stages. This study aimed to develop an efficient, automatic, quantitative, and individualized approach for preictal/interictal stage identification. Five epileptic children, who had experienced at least 2 episodes of seizures during a 24-hour video EEG recording, were included. Artifact-free preictal and interictal EEG epochs were acquired, respectively, and characterized with 216 global feature descriptors. The best subset of 5 discriminative descriptors was identified. The best subsets showed differences among the patients. Statistical analysis revealed most of the 5 descriptors in each subset were significantly different between the preictal and interictal stages for each patient. The proposed approach yielded weighted averages of 97.50% correctness, 96.92% sensitivity, 97.78% specificity, and 95.45% precision on classifying test epochs. Although the case number was limited, this study successfully integrated a new EEG analytical method to classify preictal and interictal EEG segments and might be used further in predicting the occurrence of seizures.

KEYWORDS:

classification; epilepsy; feature selection; scalp EEG; support vector classifier

PMID:
 
27177554
 
DOI:
 
10.1177/1550059416649076                                                                                                                                             ncbi
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