Identification of epileptic seizures in EEG signals using time-scale decomposition (ITD), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), phase space reconstruction (PSR) and neural networks

Traditionally, detection of epileptic seizures based on the visual inspection of neurologists is tedious, laborious and subjective. To overcome such disadvantages, numerous seizure detection techniques involving signal processing and machine learning tools have been developed. However, there still remain the problems of automatic detection with high efficiency and accuracy in distinguishing normal, interictal and ictal electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. In this study we propose a novel method for automatic identification of epileptic seizures in singe-channel EEG signals based upon time-scale decomposition (ITD), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), phase space reconstruction (PSR) and neural networks. First, EEG signals are decomposed into a series of proper rotation components (PRCs) and a baseline signal by using the ITD method. The first two PRCs of the EEG signals are extracted, which contain most of the EEG signals’ energy and are considered to be the predominant PRCs. Second, four levels DWT is employed to decompose the predominant PRCs into different frequency bands, in which third-order Daubechies (db3) wavelet function is selected for analysis. Third, phase space of the PRCs is reconstructed based on db3, in which the properties associated with the nonlinear EEG system dynamics are preserved. Three-dimensional (3D) PSR together with Euclidean distance (ED) has been utilized to derive features, which demonstrate significant difference in EEG system dynamics between normal, interictal and ictal EEG signals. Fourth, neural networks are then used to model, identify and classify EEG system dynamics between normal (healthy), interictal and ictal EEG signals. Finally, experiments are carried out on the University of Bonn’s widely used and publicly available epilepsy dataset to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method. By using the 10-fold cross-validation style, the achieved average classification accuracy for eleven cases is reported to be 98.15%. Compared with many state-of-the-art methods, the results demonstrate superior performance and the proposed method can serve as a potential candidate for the automatic detection of seizure EEG signals in the clinical application