Summary
Objectives:
The aim of the paper is to analyze transient events in inter-ictal EEG recordings,
and classify epileptic activity into focal or generalized epilepsy using an automated
method.
Methods:
A two-stage approach is proposed. In the first stage the observed transient events
of a single channel are classified into four categories: epileptic spike (ES), muscle
activity (EMG), eye blinking activity (EOG), and sharp alpha activity (SAA). The process
is based on an artificial neural network. Different artificial neural network architectures
have been tried and the network having the lowest error has been selected using the
hold out approach. In the second stage a knowledge-based system is used to produce
diagnosis for focal or generalized epileptic activity.
Results:
The classification of transient events reported high overall accuracy (84.48%), while
the knowledge-based system for epilepsy diagnosis correctly classified nine out of
ten cases.
Conclusions:
The proposed method is advantageous since it effectively detects and classifies the
undesirable activity into appropriate categories and produces a final outcome related
to the existence of epilepsy.
Keywords
EEG - automated epilepsy diagnosis - clustering - artificial neural networks - spike
detection - knowledge-based system