Epileptic seizure detection by exploiting temporal correlation of electroencephalogram signals

Electroencephalogram (EEG) has a great potential for diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders like epileptic seizure. Feature extraction and classification of EEG signals is the crucial task to detect the stages of ictal and interictal signals for treatment and precaution of epileptic patients. However, existing seizure and non-seizure feature extraction techniques are not good enough for the classification of ictal and interictal EEG signals considering the non-abruptness phenomena and inconsistency in different brain locations. In this study, the authors present a new approach for feature extraction and classification by exploiting temporal correlation within EEG signals for better seizure detection as any abruptness in the temporal correlation within a signal represents the transition of a phenomenon. In the proposed methods, they divide an EEG signal into a number of epochs and arrange them into two-dimensional matrix and then apply different transformation/decomposition to extract a number of statistical features. These features are then used as an input into LS-SVM to classify them. Experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform the existing state-of-the-art method for better classification in terms of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of ictal and interictal period of epilepsy for benchmark datasets and different brain locations.