User-Guided Interictal Spike Detection

In the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy, long-term monitoring may be required to document and study interictal activities such as interictal spikes. However, visual inspection of the EEG done by an expert is too time consuming and researchers normally resort to automatic detection methods. We describe a new EEG user-guided interictal spike detection algorithm that only requires the user to annotate a few spikes. We use the annotations to build a template that captures the relevant features of spikes, and then use Mean Squared Error (MSE) test to detect all of the other spikes in the recording. The detected events are rank ordered so that the user can easily identify the true spikes and their time of occurrence. The true spikes are then annotated to the EEG signals and reported to the EEG expert for further evaluation. This design provides a compromise between the enormous time commitments necessary to annotate recordings by hand and the inability of fully-automatic spike detection algorithms to account for the variability between subjects. Because spike morphology and spatial distribution change considerably when patients go through cycles of wake and sleep in long-term monitoring, this detection algorithm uses multichannel multiple templates to detect more than one type of event. The algorithm is able to achieve an average sensitivity of 96% and an average of 4.8 false detections/hour.