Efficient use of clinical EEG data for deep learning in epilepsy

Objective: Automating detection of Interictal Epileptiform Discharges (IEDs) in electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings can reduce the time spent on visual analysis for the diagnosis of epilepsy. Deep learning has shown potential for this purpose, but the scarceness of expert annotated data creates a bottleneck in the process.

Methods: We used EEGs from 50 patients with focal epilepsy, 49 patients with generalized epilepsy (IEDs were visually labeled by experts) and 67 controls. The data was filtered, downsampled and cut into two second epochs. We increased the number of input samples containing IEDs through temporal shifting and using different montages. A VGG C convolutional neural network was trained to detect IEDs.

Results: Using the dataset with more samples, we reduced the false positive rate from 2.11 to 0.73 detections per minute at the intersection of sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity increased from 63% to 96% at 99% specificity. The model became less sensitive to the position of the IED in the epoch and montage.

Conclusions: Temporal shifting and use of different EEG montages improves performance of deep neural networks in IED detection.

Significance: Dataset augmentation can reduce the need for expert annotation, facilitating the training of neural networks, potentially leading to a fundamental shift in EEG analysis.