Detection of focal electroencephalogram signals using higher‐order moments in EMD‐TKEO domain

Detection of epileptogenic focus based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signal screening is an important pre‐surgical step to remove affected regions inside the human brain. Considering the fact above, in this work, a novel technique for detection of focal EEG signals is proposed using a combination of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO). EEG signals belonging to focal (Fo) and non‐focal (NFo) groups were at first decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using EMD. Next, TKEO was applied on each IMF and two higher‐order statistical moments namely skewness and kurtosis were extracted as features from TKEO of each IMF. The statistical significance of the selected features was evaluated using student's t ‐test and based on the statistical test, features from first three IMFs which show very high discriminative capability were selected as inputs to a support vector machine classifier for discrimination of Fo and NFo signals. It was observed that the classification accuracy of 92.65% is obtained in classifying EEG signals using a radial basis kernel function, which demonstrates the efficacy of proposed EMD‐TKEO based feature extraction method for computer‐based treatment of patients suffering from focal seizures.