Absence Seizure Detection Algorithm for Portable EEG Devices

• Published in: Frontiers in neurology 2021-06, Vol.12, p.685814-685814
• Main Authors: Glaba, Pawel, Latka, Miroslaw, Krause, Małgorzata J., Kroczka, Sławomir, Kuryło, Marta, Kaczorowska-Frontczak, Magdalena, Walas, Wojciech, Jernajczyk, Wojciech, Sebzda, Tadeusz, West, Bruce J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: childhood absence epilepsy; detector; EEG; Neurology; portable device; wavelets
• ISSN: 1664-2295; 1664-2295
• DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2021.685814

Absence seizures are generalized nonmotor epileptic seizures with abrupt onset and termination. Transient impairment of consciousness and spike-slow wave discharges (SWDs) in EEG are their characteristic manifestations. This type of seizure is severe in two common pediatric syndromes: childhood (CAE) and juvenile (JAE) absence epilepsy. The appearance of low-cost, portable EEG devices has paved the way for long-term, remote monitoring of CAE and JAE patients. The potential benefits of this kind of monitoring include facilitating diagnosis, personalized drug titration, and determining the duration of pharmacotherapy. Herein, we present a novel absence detection algorithm based on the properties of the complex Morlet continuous wavelet transform of SWDs. We used a dataset containing EEGs from 64 patients (37 h of recordings with almost 400 seizures) and 30 age and sex-matched controls (9 h of recordings) for development and testing. For seizures lasting longer than 2 s, the detector, which analyzed two bipolar EEG channels (Fp1-T3 and Fp2-T4), achieved a sensitivity of 97.6% with 0.7/h detection rate. In the patients, all false detections were associated with epileptiform discharges, which did not yield clinical manifestations. When the duration threshold was raised to 3 s, the false detection rate fell to 0.5/h. The overlap of automatically detected seizures with the actual seizures was equal to ~96%. For EEG recordings sampled at 250 Hz, the one-channel processing speed for midrange smartphones running Android 10 (about 0.2 s per 1 min of EEG) was high enough for real-time seizure detection.