Background: Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder of the brain. Clinically, epileptic seizures are usually detected via the continuous monitoring of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by experienced neurophysiologists.
Objective: In order to detect epileptic seizures automatically with a satisfactory precision, a new method is proposed which defines hybrid features that could characterize the epileptiform waves and classify single-channel EEG signals.
Methods: The hybrid features consist of both the ones usually used in EEG signal analysis and the Kraskov entropy based on Hilbert-Huang Transform which is proposed for the first time. With the hybrid features, EEG signals are classified and the epileptic seizures are detected.
Results: Three datasets are used for test on three binary-classification problems defined by clinical requirements for epileptic seizures detection. Experimental results show that the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the proposed methods outperform two state-of-the-art methods, especially on the databases containing signals from different sources.
Conclusions: The proposed method provides a new avenue to assist neurophysiologists in diagnosing epileptic seizures automatically and accurately.
Keywords: Epilepsy; Hilbert-Huang transform; Kraskov entropy; electroencephalogram (EEG); epileptic seizures detection; hybrid features.