Automatic seizure detection using orthogonal matching pursuit, discrete wavelet transform, and entropy based features of EEG signals.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Epilepsy is a prevalent disorder that affects the central nervous system, causing seizures. In the current study, a novel algorithm is developed using electroencephalographic (EEG) signals for automatic seizure detection from the continuous EEG monitoring data.

METHODS: In the proposed methods, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) techniques are used to extract different coefficients from the EEG signals. Then, some non-linear features, such as fuzzy/approximate/sample/alphabet and correct conditional entropy, along with some statistical features are calculated using the DWT and OMP coefficients. Three widely-used EEG datasets were utilized to assess the performance of the proposed techniques.

RESULTS: The proposed OMP-based technique along with the support vector machine classifier yielded an average specificity of 96.58%, an average accuracy of 97%, and an average sensitivity of 97.08% for different types of classification tasks. Moreover, the proposed DWT-based technique provided an average sensitivity of 99.39%, an average accuracy of 99.63%, and an average specificity of 99.72%.

CONCLUSIONS: The experimental findings indicated that the proposed algorithms outperformed other existing techniques. Therefore, these algorithms can be implemented in relevant hardware to help neurologists with seizure detection.