Automated seizure diagnosis system based on feature extraction and channel selection using EEG signals

Seizure is an abnormal electrical activity of the brain. Neurologists can diagnose the seizure using several methods such as neurological examination, blood tests, computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG). Medical data, such as the EEG signal, usually includes a number of features and attributes that do not contains important information. This paper proposes an automatic seizure classification system based on extracting the most significant EEG features for seizure diagnosis. The proposed algorithm consists of five steps. The first step is the channel selection to minimize dimensionality by selecting the most affected channels using the variance parameter. The second step is the feature extraction to extract the most relevant features, 11 features, from the selected channels. The third step is to average the 11 features extracted from each channel. Next, the fourth step is the classification of the average features using the classification step. Finally, cross-validation and testing the proposed algorithm by dividing the dataset into training and testing sets. This paper presents a comparative study of seven classifiers. These classifiers were tested using two different methods: random case testing and continuous case testing. In the random case process, the KNN classifier had greater precision, specificity, positive predictability than the other classifiers. Still, the ensemble classifier had a higher sensitivity and a lower miss-rate (2.3%) than the other classifiers. For the continuous case test method, the ensemble classifier had higher metric parameters than the other classifiers. In addition, the ensemble classifier was able to detect all seizure cases without any mistake.