Epileptic Seizure Prediction: A Semi-Dilated Convolutional Neural Network Architecture

Accurate prediction of epileptic seizures has remained elusive, despite the many advances in machine learning and time-series classification. In this work, we develop a convolutional network module that exploits Electroencephalogram (EEG) scalograms to distinguish between the pre-seizure and normal brain activities. Since these scalograms have rectangular image shapes with many more temporal bins than spectral bins, the presented module uses “semi-dilated convolutions” to create a proportional non-square receptive field. The proposed semi-dilated convolutions support exponential expansion of the receptive field over the long dimension (image width, i.e. time) while maintaining high resolution over the short dimension (image height, i.e., frequency). The proposed architecture comprises a set of co-operative semi-dilated convolutional blocks, each block has a stack of parallel semi-dilated convolutional modules with different dilation rates. Results show that our proposed solution outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving seizure prediction sensitivity scores of 88.45% and 89.52% for the American Epilepsy Society and Melbourne University EEG datasets, respectively.