A channel-wise attention-based representation learning method for epileptic seizure detection and type classification

Epilepsy affect almost 1% of the worldwide population. An early diagnosis of seizure types is a crucial patient-dependent step for the treatment selection process. The selection of the proper treatment relies on the correct identification of the seizure type. As such, identifying the seizure type has the biggest immediate influence on therapy than the seizure detection, reducing the neurologist’s efforts when reading and detecting seizures in EEG recordings. Most of the existing seizure detection and classification methods are conceptualized following the patient-dependent schema thus fail to perform well with unknown cases. Our work focuses on patient-independent schema for seizure type classification and pays more attention to the explainability of the underlying attention mechanism of our method. Using a channel-wise attention mechanism, a quantification of the EEG channels contribution is enabled. Therefore, results become more interpretable and a visualization of brain lobes contribution by seizure types is allowed. We evaluate our model for seizure detection and type classification on CHB-MIT and the recently released TUH EEG Seizure, respectively. Our model is able to classify 8 seizure types with an accuracy of 98.41%, directly from raw EEG data without any preprocessing. A case study showed a high correlation between the neurological baselines and the interpretable results of our model.