Patient Independent Interictal Epileptiform Discharge Detection

Epilepsy is a highly prevalent brain condition with many serious complications arising from it. The majority of patients which present to a clinic and undergo electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring would be unlikely to experience seizures during the examination period, thus the presence of interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) become effective markers for the diagnosis of epilepsy. Furthermore, IED shapes and patterns are highly variable across individuals, yet trained experts are still able to identify them through EEG recordings – meaning that commonalities exist across IEDs that an algorithm can be trained on to detect and generalise to the larger population. This research proposes an IED detection system for the binary classification of epilepsy using scalp EEG recordings. The proposed system features an ensemble based deep learning method to boost the performance of a residual convolutional neural network, and a bidirectional long short-term memory network. This is implemented using raw EEG data, sourced from Temple University Hospital’s EEG Epilepsy Corpus, and is found to outperform the current state of the art model for IED detection across the same dataset. The achieved accuracy and Area Under Curve (AUC) of 94.92% and 97.45% demonstrates the effectiveness of an ensemble method, and that IED detection can be achieved with high performance using raw scalp EEG data, thus showing promise for the proposed approach in clinical settings.