Epileptic Spike Detection by Recurrent Neural Networks with Self-Attention Mechanism

Abstract

ObjectiveBecause of the lack of highly skilled experts, automated technologies that support electroencephalogram (EEG)-based in epilepsy diagnosis are advancing. Deep convolutional neural network-based models have been used successfully for detecting epileptic spikes, one of the biomarkers, from EEG. However, a sizeable number of supervised EEG records are required for training. ApproachThis study introduces the Satelight model, which uses the self-attention (SA) mechanism. The model was trained using a clinical EEG dataset labeled by five specialists, including 16,008 epileptic spikes and 15,478 artifacts from 50 children. The SA mechanism is expected to reduce the number of parameters and efficiently extract features from a small amount of EEG data. To validate the effectiveness, we compared various spike detection approaches with the clinical EEG data. Main resultsThe experimental results showed that the proposed method detected epileptic spikes more effectively than other models (accuracy = 0.876 and false positive rate = 0.133). SignificanceThe proposed model had only one-tenth the number of parameters as the other effective model, despite having such a high detection performance. Further exploration of the hidden parameters revealed that the model automatically attended to the EEGs characteristic waveform locations of interest.