Detection of temporal lobe seizures and identification of lateralisation from audified EEG

Objective: To investigate the accuracy of human listeners in identifying epileptic seizures and seizure lateralisation from audified EEG signals.

Methods: EEG data from 17 temporal lobe epilepsy patients (9 male, 8 female; aged 23-55) was converted to audio format by 60× time compression. Using a subset of 19% of the data, five auditory participants (2 female, 3 male; aged 23-58) were trained to identify seizures and their lateralisation by listening to audified EEG signals from difference electrodes P3-T5 and P4-T6. Following training, seizure detection performance of the auditory participants was tested using the remaining data.

Results: Allowing a 5s auditory time margin for successful detection, the mean sensitivity of the five auditory participants was 89.6% (SD 8.3%) with a false detection rate of only 0.0068/h (SD 0.0077/h). The mean accuracy of seizure lateralisation identification was 77.6% (SD 7.1%).

Conclusions: With a limited amount of training, humans can detect seizures and seizure lateralisation from audified EEG signals of electrodes P3-T5 and P4-T6 with accuracy comparable to visual assessment of full EEG traces (21 electrodes) by an expert encephalographer.

Significance: A more efficient and accurate clinical tool for assessing EEG data based on audification may be developed, which will improve diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy.