Automated Detection of Abnormal EEGs in Epilepsy With a Compact and Efficient CNN Model

Electroencephalography (EEG) is essential for the diagnosis of epilepsy, but it requires expertise and experience to identify abnormalities. It is thus crucial to develop automated models for the detection of abnormal EEGs related to epilepsy. This paper describes the development of a novel class of compact and efficient convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for detecting abnormal time intervals and electrodes in EEGs for epilepsy. The designed model is inspired by a CNN developed for brain-computer interfacing called multichannel EEGNet (mEEGNet). Unlike the EEGNet, the proposed model, mEEGNet, has the same number of electrode inputs and outputs to detect abnormalities. The mEEGNet was evaluated with a clinical dataset consisting of 29 cases of juvenile and childhood absence epilepsy labeled by a clinical expert. The labels were given to paroxysmal discharges visually observed in both ictal (seizure) and interictal (nonseizure) intervals. Results showed that the mEEGNet detected abnormal EEGs with the area under the curve, F1-values, and sensitivity equivalent to or higher than those of existing CNNs. Moreover, the number of parameters is much smaller than other CNN models. To our knowledge, the dataset of absence epilepsy validated with machine learning through this research is the largest in the literature.